


Call and Respond

by LuckyFeedback



Series: Call and Respond [1]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Action, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Development, Courtroom Drama, Dark, Developing Relationship, Drug Use, F/M, Game: Resident Evil Outbreak, Mental Health Issues, Minor Canonical Character(s), Plothole Fill, Politics, Post-Canon, Post-Resident Evil 2, Post-Resident Evil 3 Remake, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:20:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 34
Words: 155,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24922204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuckyFeedback/pseuds/LuckyFeedback
Summary: [No longer being updated]
Relationships: Carlos Oliveira/Jill Valentine
Series: Call and Respond [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1803556
Comments: 288
Kudos: 170





	1. Far From Home

**Author's Note:**

> 12/31/20 — Hey guys! I hope you’re all doing okay and having happy holidays. I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe and healthy. 
> 
> I appreciate you reading my story and coming on this adventure with me. I’ve been thinking about C&R for a while and I unfortunately think this story will end up going unfinished. The unfortunate truth is it seems interaction/interest for RE stuff, and this ship is way, way down, and therefore it’s not getting the sort of response from readers it once did. While I love writing, and writing for you guys, if the audience isn’t there my interest in writing it also kind of disappears, which has been part of why chapters are so slow. I’ve had so much fun doing this and accomplished more than I thought I could in a single story, and that was thanks to the support I got from the AO3 community. I appreciate all of you, and thank you so so much for reading my writing! 
> 
> I’ll leave it up and maybe will work on other stories in the meantime. Again, I hope you’re all doing okay, and thank you so much for your support, kind words, your kudos, all of it. 🖤 I love you guys!!  
> \- lucky

Carlos suspected two things: that he loved Jill, and that things would get worse. 

Both made him afraid. 

Carlos’ nature — a nature of easiness and honesty, of rarely struggling with factors outside of his control — put him at odds with a world that had become more cruel, more strange, more dangerous by the minute. His life before was smooth, marked by a cheerful restlessness, free of introspection. Things were what they were, and they would be dealt with when they had to be.

That was, until last week.

If the situation worsened… worsened from the abject sorrow and senseless pain he’d witnessed in Raccoon City... he wasn’t sure how to deal with that. He couldn’t grasp how the situation _could_ be worse. To secure their passage from that little slice of hell, Carlos had thrown everything he had against the wall, borrowed what he didn’t, and still almost come up short. Fear of the unknown was an alien concept, uncomfortable and ill-fitting, like somebody else’s clothes. So, Carlos did what he knew how to do, until he had to do the next thing. He flew.

Carlos moved one of his hands and checked the gas gauge of the helicopter. The fluorescent red needle rested a slight hair above the large printed _E_ : their fuel reserves were almost depleted. He wasn’t the greatest pilot his unit had - that man had wandered away in search of survivors, out onto black asphalt streets that glittered with rain and broken glass, never to return. But Carlos did in a pinch, knew enough, practiced enough to be dangerous. He’d nailed the takeoff; now to land this piece of crap and also not kill both himself and his passenger. He was halfway there. 

Ahead of them was a great, yawning stretch of emerald green, at first hard to see against the slanted golden-orange light of mid-day. As they neared, the spreading green swallowed the horizon, stretched to fill his field of vision, edge to edge. Pockets of cinnamon red and flecks of greenish-gold dotted the landscape. Autumn was coming. Life was moving on.

They had flown South out of Raccoon, past brown and yellow patches of striped farmland, wide tan rivers that frothed and bucked against their shores, and a few city areas with skyscrapers that reached to the sky like needy, gleaming, grasping fingers. Carlos had no idea where they were; he was lost, and he was tired, a kind of exhaustion that grabbed onto you, wrung you out like a dishtowel. Bright lights became brighter and sounds became inescapable, loud, hyper-focused. His face hurt where his lip had been split, the skin around one of his eyes tingled and obscured half of his vision as it swelled shut. His bare arms were a patchwork of divots, slashes, huge criss-crossed scabs; he felt sore and pulled and tired everywhere, like a walking bruise. His head pounded and his stomach howled at him for food, food he had no interest in. He’d had enough eating for a lifetime. His hands, large and strong and heavily veined beneath tanned skin, gripped the controls hard enough for his knuckles to blanch white like bone.

For all of his injuries, Carlos was unconcerned about himself. He was concerned about his passenger. He did what he knew best to keep her with him: he talked to her.

“You still awake?” Carlos called back over his shoulder. 

“Barely,” Jill said, thick with fatigue. "But I'm here."

“So I got an idea,” he said, “when we get out of all of this, I’m gonna take you out for dinner. What do you say? You an Italian or a Mexican kind of lady?”

“Wait,” Jill said, a weak sound almost lost under the insistent whip of the blades overhead. “Are you asking me on a date?”

“Would you say no if I did?”  
“Can’t answer a question with a question.”  
Carlos shook his head. “Would you believe I keep forgettin’ you’re a cop?”

She was silent long enough for him to believe she’d slipped into sleep again, and he readied another question to rouse her, when she said: “Japanese.”

Carlos turned his head, faced back to the window. “Say again? Didn’t hear you.”

“Japanese,” Jill repeated, louder this time. “If someone was to take me on a date, Japanese is my favorite. Sushi. That kind of stuff.”

“Japanese you want, Japanese you’re gonna get - soon as we get this bird on the ground in the next ten or so,” he said, fought to keep the nerves from his voice, “make sure you hold onto something.” Behind him, Jill’s boots scuffed on the floor, and she grunted, a soft, pained noise. She sat with one of the black canvas loops bolted to the helicopter’s ceiling in her hand, her face turned away from her underarm.

They circled over a bare spot between two enormous hills lined with frothing crescents of multicolored trees. As Carlos lowered the craft, fields of grass and flowering plants blew and bent, tiny specks of tawny brown and white bounded in waves away from the boom of blades. Ahead, a campground came into view, a small clearing of dirt and gravel, maybe a space for trucks and campers. He aimed for it with the helicopter’s landing gear, lowered them with gun-shy care; the craft stuttered and rocked under his inexperienced hands.

The blades kicked a cyclone of moist dirt, swirling leaves, and torn blades of grass into the chill October air. The craft landed with a ginger hesitance and took the last five feet hard; an angular metallic creak and a bang of something essential and expensive being broken. The engine ceased its rumble. The rotor beat its sonic tattoo and slowed to a stop. Motion was suspended and they were still, safe against the ground.

Carlos’ heart thumped inside the cavern of his chest, the sound of blood swished and beat against his ears. The cabin was suddenly too close, too heavy, too hot, and he fought to strip off all he could; the heavy plates of his olive drab flak vest, his leather gloves, belts of pouches and heavy weaponry. He felt a simultaneous nakedness and freedom, stripped down to just his pants and t-shirt, damp with sweat that cooled almost instantaneously. When he was free, able to maneuver and breathe, Carlos stood and navigated over the center console, unsteady with nerves. He nearly tripped, and had to hop on one foot to keep his balance. Jill was turned, and watched him over the back of the bench. She smiled at him, made to stand and stopped herself, surprised by her own sudden wobble.

“Hey, take it easy,” Carlos’ hands darted out to Jill’s sides to steady her. She lowered herself back down to the seat, slow and cautious.

“You did a great job,” she said. “I’m really impressed.” 

“Huh. An attaboy?” Carlos sat beside her. The skin of their bare arms touched in the faintest of brushes, and he put a hand on her forehead. “You sure you’re not sick?”

“Don’t push it.” 

The radio on the dash crackled to life.

_“This is Tower 4153, aircraft you are not authorized - repeat - not authorized to land in GWNF. Please state your name and the nature of your emergency landing. Over.”_

Like mirror reflections, their eyes flicked to one another before either moved. 

“I can talk to them,” Carlos said. “You stay here.”

Jill shook her head. “I’ll do it. I have some questions I want answered. What’s the frequency?”

Carlos told her. Jill unhooked the radio attached to her hip, pushed a few buttons on its console, and waited for the controller’s voice to sound over its grated transmitter.

_“Repeat: this is Tower 4153, aircraft you are not authorized - repeat - not authorized to land in GWNF. Please state your name and the nature of your emergency landing. Over.”_

“This is Jillian Valentine, officer of the Raccoon City Police Department, Special Tactics and Rescue Service. There are two people aboard, myself and one other survivor. We departed Raccoon City southward via helicopter before the payload dropped. Neither of us are infected, no bites, but we are out of fuel and need medical attention. Over.”

A pause.

_“Aircraft this is Tower 4153 confirming southward route from Raccoon City Indiana on October 1, 1998. Over.”_

Jill pressed the button. “That’s correct. Over.”

There was a long, heavy silence that spanned into minutes. Carlos’ eyes were distant, fixed on some unremarkable spot on the floor as he rubbed his beard, and listened.

Jill pushed the bright red button on the side of the radio. “Tower 4153, did you read? Over.”

Immediate: _“This is tower 4153, please stand by for further instruction. Over.”_

Their eyes met, a confirmation of concern and uncertainty. Neither spoke.

_“Aircraft, this is tower 4153. Orders as follows: you are to remain sheltered in place. Lock the doors to the craft. Do not open the doors or windows to your craft. Do not exit the craft. Do not discard biological material outside the craft. Local authorities will notify you of further instruction. Until that point you are to remain inside at all times. Over.”_

“They think we’re infected,” Carlos said, with a slow, dawning sense of disbelief.

Jill’s expression was serious, shot through with a vein of sympathy. “We can’t be sure we’re not,” she said, pushed the button one last time. “Loud and clear Tower, we’ll stay inside until we see you. Over and out.”

“Guess we just wait,” Carlos said, “maybe get some rest.”

“I think that’d help,” Jill said. She stunk like adrenaline sweat and death, but Carlos didn’t care; he was enamored with her, and his want of closeness overpowered a startling number of ills. She had boarded the chopper only three hours ago with a pronounced limp but otherwise no worse for wear, but as the day had turned from the blaze of sunrise to the cold blue of mid morning, she too had changed, slumped by degrees in her seat.

“How are you feeling?” He asked, his voice quiet.

Jill shook her head; her intelligent, foxlike eyes were tired, drawn with puffy lines ringed by bruised purple. 

“You ever…” she said, paused to wet her lips with her tongue, “you ever felt sort of weird and then gone to sleep and woken up with a full-blown cold and wonder how you took being not-sick for granted? Imagine that but instead of a sore throat, its basically your whole body.” She shifted, grimaced, and it looked like the act of sitting upright and supporting her own weight was uncomfortable. “Everything hurts.” 

Carlos laughed. Jill looked at him, her expression defensive, and said, “What?”

“I just like the way you say things,” he said, “that’s real smart. I would have never thought of it that way.”

“Oh,” she said, and after a moment’s consideration, the harsh lines of her expression softened, with a quiet, warm laugh that was almost a giggle. “I didn’t think it was funny… but… I guess it is.”

Carlos nudged her with his shoulder. “Should give yourself some more credit.”

Jill cast her eyes down, then back up to him, the smile on her face still present. Even tired, even beat to shit, covered in blood with dirty, sweaty hair, she was beautiful.

From the dash, from the close proximity of Jill’s radio, another sound screamed for their attention, squalled with a jarring metal-on-metal screech. A chill ran down Carlos’ spine. Jill tensed, her shyness lost and her eyes sharp. A long beep sounded in a single note, as long as it was unpleasant.

_Beeeeep_

A muffled male voice.

 _“This is an announcement from Emergency Alert System. This is not a test. Civil authorities have announced an Emergency Action Notification. Civil authorities have received unconfirmed reports of hazardous biological material released within George Washington National Forest. A shelter-in-place order has been issued the following counties,”_ the robotic voice went on to list six, _“seek shelter immediately. Do not leave your home until the all-clear has been given. Do not use running water. Do not answer knocks on your door unless notified previously by authorities. If you are within the forest, seek shelter within a vehicle or building immediately. Details will be released as more information becomes available. Stay tuned to this radio frequency for further instruction. This is not a test.”_

_Beeeeep_

“Jesus,” Jill said, and covered her face with her hands. “That scared the shit out of me.”

“George Washington National Forest,” Carlos said, his voice far away, thoughtful. “You know where that is?”

“Sounds like a long way from home.” There was a note of defeat, of resignation, in her voice.

Carlos didn’t know what to do. He had no idea what she was going through — though they’d suffered similar predicaments and losses in these last few violent days, he had no idea what it was like to lose everything, to have your True North blink out of existence. Without thinking about it, he slid his hand over her back, looped his arm around her shoulders. Jill watched him do it, and Carlos expected her to stop him in her pride, to push him away, maybe freeze up and tell him thanks but no thanks. 

Instead, she shifted her hips towards him, and nestled against the crook between his neck and his collarbone. The way she settled against him, the soft brush of her breath against the hollow of his throat tied around something in his chest like a slip of warm ribbon, and he was anchored. 

“You smell awful,” she said, softly, and closed her eyes.   
“That’s the smell of manliness, lady.”

There was no response, no witty rejoinder, no banter. The tense line of her shoulders softened in gradual comfort under his arm. After a few silent moments, one of her hands was on his thigh, the tips of her fingers a hair’s breadth from his groin; he looked at it in confusion and the sound of quiet, musical snores gave Carlos his answer. He moved her hand, placed it by her side. 

Carlos looked around the cabin, out into the woods that surrounded them, the cool autumn sunshine dappled against trees that exchanged their green finery for the shimmer of reds, oranges, yellows. Bird songs and the industrious trill of insects quivered on the wind. Body warmth and the cadence of quiet snores against the stillness amplified the seductive pull of sleep, his eyelids heavy and sore.

Carlos settled back against the thick pads of the helicopter’s seat bench, Jill’s weight leaned on his shoulder, and slept. 


	2. Fell on Black Days

It was night time, Jill realized, in a slow, confused blink.

She awoke to a world of foggy layers of unfamiliarity. She didn’t recognize anything, not immediately; dusky shadows of black and deep jeweled blue draped over the world, shadows that stretched and danced, concealed her surroundings and their meanings. The air, somehow chill on her back and warm against her chest, was gravid with the drone of insects and the throaty chirp of frogs. 

That chill plucked at the downy hair on her arms, spread over the bare skin of her shoulders. A heartbeat, steady and deep, thumped against her ear, and she realized with momentary confusion that she was leaned sideways across the heavy animal warmth of another body, between a pair of strong legs and against the soft knit of a cotton t-shirt. Her brain, slow and encumbered from sleep, filled in the blanks with what made sense; she put down a hand, pushed herself back. Her understanding of the situation pitched, just then, turned on its side.

Beneath her Carlos slept with an undignified peace, his back propped against the wall. One of his hands rested on her shoulder, the other behind his head, which had sunk to a position that was sure to give him a sore neck when he awoke, his mouth slightly parted and his breaths heavy and regular, warm against her face. She wasn’t sure how long she’d slept, but her body felt a little more solid, a little less treacherous in its sudden weakness. She sat up, carefully and slowly, so as to not disturb him. 

Jill took an extra moment to think about just what had happened before she’d fallen asleep, the pit of her stomach hollow with dread; black pockets and hours had vanished from her memory, left with only snippets her brain had stored under its fog. They were huddled together against the cold but both were still clothed. The dark chunk of scab that knitted the two sides of Carlos’ bottom lip together meant they probably hadn’t… 

Probably. _Probably_ hadn’t. She couldn’t remember. In its post-rest clarity, her mind went with laser precision to another man: Chris, loyal and steadfast Chris, who these days was more of a promise of a future reward, and not a figure she interacted with. He had been gone for so long.

Not for the first time, she thought: _There has to be some explanation for this. I wouldn’t just… even if I was tired, I wouldn’t, not while Chris is..._

Jill tried to remember Chris’ face, and returned with intellectual pieces of information that identified him; green eyes, brown hair clipped short, how he was fair but still managed to tan in patches and fits, which he blamed on his Scottish heritage (along with basically all else that was unflattering about him). The picture was foggy, overlaid with the dark, broad features of the man asleep before her, and the lack of precision frustrated her, made her frustrated at herself and her own memory’s fickleness. 

_There has to be some explanation_ is where she settled, and slammed closed the topic for the moment.

Jill’s torso moved just slightly askew, bent the wrong way by just a touch, and she faltered under a sharp, twisting pain on her right side that sucked the air from her lungs. She gasped in a quiet groan, a clutched hand on her ribs, the dirty shag of her brown hair fell across her eyes as she bowed her head. Carlos blinked awake with a sudden jolt; his eyes searched the cabin before they settled on her. He sat up, rubbed at his eyes with the heel of a palm, his dark, coarse hair mussed and tangled from sleep. 

“You okay? What’s wrong?”  
“I — my side _really_ fucking hurts,” Jill pushed herself to a sit, her knees together. The stillness helped; the pain ebbed away from her into a low drone. “ _Fuck_.”  
“Here. Lemme look at it,” Carlos inched closer, hands held out to her.   
Jill eyed him, and leaned away despite herself. The sudden concern in his face faltered.  
“Ah, come on. You know that’s not—”  
“Look, Carlos, I’ll be okay. It’s just a bruise, or something. Really.”  
His eyebrows tilted up, and his expression confused. “You sure? I can—”  
“I’ll be _fine_.” Jill’s tone was stern and cold, sharp. His mouth was still open, parted slightly in his interrupted word, and his face, in its confusion, was edged with what Jill thought was hurt. A sudden pang of regret plucked at her chest, the feeling of something that sounded so good and clear in your head that exited your mouth in a way that slashed and drew blood, unable to be recanted.  
Carlos settled back to his seat. “You got it. Sorry. Was just tryin’ to help.”

Jill considered an apology, but it was too far gone now, and the more the seconds ticked by, the harder her pride pushed for her to just move on with life — he could deal with it. She glanced over to him; he sat in silence, picked at his fingernails. Over his shoulder, however, was a pin-prick of light. Then two, then three.

Jill sat up in a sudden rush, injury forgotten, ears and eyes sharp as a guard dog alerted to the presence of a stranger.

"I think they're here. I can see their lights." Jill climbed to her feet with some difficulty, arm looped around her injured torso. Carlos joined her in front of the closed bay window; their reflections against the dark glass like a funhouse mirror. He was man of intimidating physical size, the crown of Jill’s brown hair barely brushed his chin, and beside her, he looked every part the behemoth, a solid pack of muscle that shifted under the dark fabric of his shirt. She hadn’t noticed before he’d stood beside her how slight she’d become, how frail she looked, how easily the darkness settled into new gaunt curves under her eyes. 

Out in the blackness of the forest, a line of lights wound into view, tangled and twirled through the trees like distant fireflies. 

"Eight of 'em," Carlos said, "That your count?"

"I count eight. I’m gonna signal them.” Jill felt his eyes on her, saw him move in the reflection against the window, and looked up at him in turn.

Carlos extended his fist, waited, his knuckles towards her. “We still good?”

Jill bumped her knuckles against his. “Always.” 

Carlos seemed satisfied by this, and crossed his arms returned his attention to the lights in the distance. Jill pushed the button on the side of the light looped over the strap of her shirt, clicked it four times and then a break. She repeated this until the line stopped, the flashlights focused in the direction of their craft, and the line proceeded in their direction.

The bobbing procession of lights closed on them. Someone too dark to see against the shadows stopped the line with a gesture of their flashlight, then approached. As he came into focus, he high-stepped over roots and brambles and folds of dirt, the moonlight pooled on his wide-brim hat, the dark brown sheriff’s jacket with the fur trim zipped close to his neck. The intrusive headlight blare of a flashlight flickered around the cabin before it settled on them. They winced against it, bloodstained and streaked with dirt.

“Ya'll alright in there?” The Sheriff called. He tilted his face up to them, long and drawn in carved angles of age and stress. He looked at Jill, her wounded stance, and she watched his free hand drift to the waistband of his khaki pants, just above where a gun hung in a worn leather holster.

"We're fine," Jill said, "a little banged up but no serious injuries. Neither of us are infected, as far as we know. No bites." 

As Jill spoke, the officer’s light drifted over to Carlos, as if he’d lost interest somewhere in the middle of her sentence. "They said you're police?" He said to Carlos, unconvinced.

"That's her. I'm just a guy she picked up on her way out of the city."

"You don't much sound like you're from Indiana, son."

"New York. Was in Raccoon City on business."

The Sheriff tilted his flashlight down, examined Carlos’ olive drab fatigue pants. He finally swiveled back to Jill. "What's your name, sweetheart?" 

"Jill Valentine. Special Tactics and Rescue Service."

"You’re a long way from home. Made it all the way to Virginia on one tank of gas?” The Sheriff’s attention drifted, this time fixed on the aircraft, studied its carapace in an evaluative squint. His jaw worked in thought, muscles tensed under the skin. “Y'all didn't stop nowhere else?" 

"We just flew in the first direction we saw. This is where we ran out."

"Mhm. Well, mighty sorry to hear what happened to your city. Been all over the news for the last week, what with the… fires and riots and all manner of unpleasantness.”

Jill was silent for a long, pointed beat. “Right. Unpleasantness.”

“Well, I don’t gotta tell you. If you’ll excuse me, I gotta go have a conversation with our friends back here. You two wait there. We’ll come get you." 

The Sheriff turned and walked back to the line of trees, his pace lackadaisical. Jill took a deep, steadying breath, released it in a slow sigh through her nose. 

"What do you think, sweetheart?" Carlos asked, in a whisper.

"Shut up," Jill knocked one of her boots against his. 

From the treeline, emerging in a cluster, were a group of people in bulky suits the color of a cloudless sky. The plastic shone and reflected the light, their heavy transparent face shields lit from behind, their faces visible. They moved like children in snow suits over the uneven terrain, limbs just too wide to allow them to walk at a normal clip. 

One of the men in the space suits broke apart from the pack, walked to the helicopter, looked up into the window, still closed. 

"Jill Valentine?" He said. 

"That's me." 

"Very nice to meet you, though I do wish it could have been under better circumstances. I'm doctor Raj Behara of the Federal Bioterror Commission." His voice jutted and clipped into the alien peaks and valleys of a nonnative speaker; Indian, perhaps. He held a clipboard in one of his bulky blue gloves, a pen in the other, and behind his mask, his skin was the color of wet sandpaper, eyes black as jet. "You said neither you nor your passenger are bitten?"

"That's right," Jill said, "no bites."

Beside her, Carlos’ silence turned from placid to uncomfortable; the air around him grew heavy, as if he struggled to find the words to say something.

"She needs help first," Carlos added, in a tumble, "she got the worst of it. I can wait, but she’s hurt bad."

Jill looked up at him. “What are you doing?” She whispered. 

The doctor looked up from his clipboard, and scanned them both. His eyes were sympathetic, evaluative. 

Carlos turned to her. “You’re hurt.” 

“But so are you. I’ll be fine.”

“I know you’re tough,” Carlos said, his voice pitched low so it didn’t carry, “but you gotta let other people be tough for you sometimes, too.”

Jill wasn’t a woman others could accuse of often being lost for words. She searched his face, opened her mouth to offer up a counter, and found nothing but silence.

“Thank you,” she said, finally.

"We'll do a full physical, of course," Dr. Behara said, scribbled something on his clipboard, "you will both be taken care of. Give us a moment to set up, please."

They rolled out what looked like a massive pad that you’d use for training a dog; white and absorbent and edged with the same powder blue their suits were made of. They smoothed it, made sure there were no gaps between the craft and the edge, no tears. Two of the figures hauled what looked like a massive cooler you’d store beer in, white and plastic, by two handles on either side, and set it on the pad. They opened the container, freeing gadgets and shining tools that Jill couldn’t even guess were used for. Moths fluttered and danced around the stark beams of their flashlights, and when they turned, gleaming sets of small animal eyes watched the scene from the distance of the tree line.

“Officer,” Dr. Behara said, waving Jill forward, “this way, please. Stay on the mat.”

They opened the door to the chopper, metal against metal, and the chill of the night flooded the cabin. Jill stared at the pad below, its perfect whiteness. Days ago, perhaps hours ago, she wouldn’t have glanced at a five-foot drop twice; now it gave her vertigo, a phantom twinge pain in her leg. Jill hobbled to the edge of the floor and sat. Her legs dangled over the side, and the doctor offered her a hand; she took it and dropped. He steadied her, his clipboard under his arm. 

“This way,” the doctor said, gesturing to a group of them, “please.”

Carlos’ weight thumped down behind her, and the scientists separated them, three crowding Carlos to the right of the craft. The remaining four gathered around Jill like a race of interested aliens; they ran thermometers over her forehead, asked questions, wrote the the answers down on paper. Over their heads, Jill could see Carlos being poked and prodded at, the gashes on his arms being measured with paper tape and recorded, another one of them tipped onto their toes to run a thermometer over his forehead.

Someone beside Jill cleared their throat, and then a voice, timid and nasal. “Take off your clothes, please.” 

“Right here?” Jill asked. Jill looked around to the valley of prying eyes that surrounded her; blank stares were the response. 

The man’s sigh was audible at her hesitation, irritated. “Now, please? I need it all, clothes, boots, personal effects.”

"Okay..." She grabbed the hem of her tank top, damp and crusted with God knows what, pulled it over her head. She dropped it into an outstretched plastic bag, then leaned over to work the laces free from her boots. 

"It's routine," Jill heard someone tell Carlos in the distance, "she's totally safe. I still need your arm." 

Distracted by the removal of her clothes, Jill didn’t notice the scientist cut away the bandage on her left bicep until it was too late. Immediately, something in the air changed, darkened, became more panicked and unsure. One of the scientists cursed under her breath, _shit_ , waved another over, who awkwardly crouched and shone a flashlight against Jill’s arm. They called to Dr. Behara, who stopped his writing and jogged to them, an action his suit relegated to an awkward astronaut hobble. Jill stood stock-still; her eyes flicked back and forth between them. In habit, she looked over their heads at Carlos for confirmation, or reassurance, or safety. Maybe all three. 

Something in her expression made Carlos’ body move on its own. He shrugged off the lady scientist who was spoke at him, past him, called him “sir” and ordered him to stay put and used words that meant nothing to him like “protocol” and “restriction”. Her body moved out of his way as easily as a child’s, and he stalked to the group around Jill who gaggled and gasped and spoke in breathless shock, grouped around her like a huddle of football players. The Sheriff cut into Carlos’ path like a skulking dance partner, a hand outstretched against Carlos’ chest.

“Not a good idea, son,” Jill heard the Sheriff say, “let them do their job and we won’t have a problem.” 

“This wound,” said the doctor, indicated the deep puncture wound on her arm, which still drizzled blood and clear fluid, “what did this come from?”

“I—” Jill stammered, “it’s a long story. It…” 

“Officer Valentine,” the doctor repeated, “We do not have time for long stories. Yes or no. Did this puncture wound, on the bicep your left arm, come from any of the bioweapons in Raccoon City?”

Jill was silent. Then, with a note of defeat, “Yes. But—” 

She continued to speak but it was lost under the rush of activity, the rabble of excitement, of fear. One of the scientists mumbled, “oh shit” and looked, helpless, at the doctor behind him.

“Yup - look at her,” one of the scientists said to another, low and nervy, “look at her skin. Her fingers are hypoxic.”

“Mucous membranes cracked and bleeding,” another agreed, “fuck. Doctor?”

“You said you weren’t bitten.” The Sheriff rounded on Jill, this time. His hand didn’t hover, instead rested on the pommel of his revolver. “On the radio. You said you had no infected. You got anything else you wanna tell me?” 

“She’s not infected,” Carlos yelled over the crush, “there was a vaccine. I… I gave it to her.”

The silence became its own living being; it grew, mutated, hulked, and as soon as they left his mouth, Carlos seemed to realize his words were a mistake. The doctor stood up and stalked to him, waved the Sheriff away with a testy gesture.

“You had a vaccine for the T-Virus and _you used it_?” Dr. Behara said, words like a hiss. “For _one person_? Am I hearing you correctly, Mr…”

“Oliveira,” Carlos said, and though his voice shook, he projected it anyway. “Loud and clear, doc, and I’d do it again, every single fuckin’ time, if it meant she made it out.” Carlos’ eyes flicked up to her, couldn’t meet her gaze for an extended period, and he looked away.

Jill’s chest was full to splitting of apologies and admonishments that didn’t make it to her mouth.

“Unbelievable.” The doctor whispered, voice full of venom and disbelief. “We’re running a Code Yellow,” he called to the rest of his crew, “call it in. You—” he said, turned back to Carlos, “I hope you can live with what you’ve done, Mr. Oliveira, because many others won’t.”

A pinch, long and knife-sharp and deep slid against Jill’s throat with sudden, silvery malice. Her hand flew to where it entered her, and the world began to spin. 

“Sorry,” said a voice behind her, muffled behind plastic, “just protocol. Lay down and try to rest.”

In the distance, Carlos’ eyes went wide, his mouth dropped open; the world rolled onto its side and there were only sounds, sounds of a rush, of excited chatter, then what sounded like the breaking of something thick and heavy, of screams. Then a sharp, loud, electrical zap, twice, and a strangled cry — Carlos’. A series of heavy thumps, and then silence. 

Jill tried to cry out, but her mouth wouldn’t move.

She rolled her head to the side, the ragged sound of her own breaths echoed into eternity; four of them, four of them in their shining candy-blue outfits, hands under his arms, dragged Carlos’ body away. The toes of his boots created divots in the soft dirt. Hands, countless and cold that moved with pitiless clinical precision, cut away her clothing, her boots, her necklace. She tried to move her hands, vaguely aware that this last should have sprung her into action, should have some sort of meaning, but under the weight against her brain, nothing mattered. It was ending. It was ending like _this_ , and she couldn’t stop it. After all of this... after...

Her breaths echoed against her ears.

 _There has to be some explanation_ , she thought, and a single bead of warmth trembled against the corner of her eye, fell down across her face, and everything faded out under the indifferent starlight.


	3. What's Your Ask?

Carlos awoke to light and a hard pain in his shoulder, jammed and stiff. He groaned and tried to swallow, throat dry and tight as sand. His head split down the middle in a thunderclap of pain, his chest and feet cold like blocks of ice. He waited for his faculties to come back to him. The halogen lights on the ceiling swam, multiplied, then swirled together to form a single spotlight with many eyes, encased in a metal cone.

“Good morning,” said a male voice. Carlos lifted his head and squinted to the source of the sound – a small man with skin the color of wet sandpaper, thin jet-black hair, eyes as dark as coal. He was wearing lab coat and carrying a clipboard. The white of his jacket was painful to Carlos’ eyes as they struggled for purchase and reason. Beside the doctor stood another man with a face like a boxer and hair shorn so close to his scalp that its color was imperceptible. He wore a dress uniform that Carlos recognized; he was a Captain, frocked in a tan-and-forest green uniform covered in medals and badges. The man watched, his face a stern rumble of forehead lines and a frown. Both men stood behind a heavy barricade, floor to ceiling, made of some clear material — plexiglass or plastic or something like that — that separated Carlos’ hospital room, in its grey metals and stark whites and clinical emptiness, from an office beyond.

Carlos rolled onto an elbow, slow and stiff, and looked down. He was shirtless and shoeless, covered only by a pair of loose teal drawstring pants that felt like they were made of paper. They stretched and pulled against the big muscles of his legs as he stood from the bed. 

A needle was buried in a thick pumping vein that snaked up Carlos’ forearm; it pinched and stung as he moved, yanked his arm back towards the other side of the bed. A long tube connected it to a hanging bag of clear mystery fluid that dangled from a hook on a pole set on three wheels. Carlos smelled like alcohol, but not the kind you drank - the kind you cleaned with. His skin was dry as dust, flaking at the bends of his elbows, cracking at the crevices between his fingers. They’d shaved the tangle of black hair that ran from his chest to his groin, shaved his arms, the downy, fine, black hairs on the backs of his hands and his fingers. Everything was prickly with stubborn regrowth, even the hair on his head, which was now almost completely missing.

Carlos regarded the needle and tubing with immediate distrust. 

“It’s just saline,” the doctor said by way of explanation, “you were extremely dehydrated. And I’m sorry about the scrubs, those were the only pair we had large enough. None of the shirts fit. We’re trying to find some.”

“I recognize you,” Carlos said, “’ _I hope you can live with what you did._ ’ Right?”

“An… overreaction made in the heat of the moment, to be sure. I apologize for my rudeness. I’m Doctor Behara—”

“I remember.” Carlos said.

“—and I’ll be overseeing your recovery. You’re in the decontamination process, so... try to remain calm. If you’re infected, anger and heightened emotional responses only contribute to the stress that makes the virus mutate faster.”

Carlos pulled the metal tripod along with him, like a hesitant dance partner. “I don’t need a science lesson. Tell me what you did with Jill.”

The man’s face didn’t change a single degree, a single twitch, and he shook his head. “Not possible,” he said, “that information is protected under HIPAA.”

The anger flowed heavy and hot, the only thing Carlos could grab onto with both hands. 

“The fuck does that mean?” Carlos forced himself to be still. “Jill Valentine.” He repeated. “The woman I was with. You took her. _Where_?”

The man scribbled on his clipboard, and fixed Carlos with a look of exasperation. “Look, Mr. Oliveira, I understand you’re upset, but that’s breaking federal law. Nor can I tell her about where you’re being treated, I’m afraid.”

“So she asked, but you just didn’t tell her.” 

The Doctor’s face fell, just a touch, and Carlos thought he saw a vein of sympathy. “She hasn’t. But, that’s not why I’m here.”

Carlos’ remembered her face, the way she flinched away from him, refused to even get close to him. It made sense, though something heavy and permanent in his chest sank.

“Hopefully we can get off on a better foot than this.” Dr. Behara said, his tone cautious. “We’re hoping you’ll come around and decide that we work better as a team than as adversaries. I understand our first meeting was most likely traumatic.”

“Traumatic,” Carlos laughed, a sarcastic sound devoid of good humor; it was closer to the shake of a rattlesnake. “You violate her in front of everyone, you strip me down and throw me in a fucking hamster cage, and you think I’m gonna work with you? Go fuck yourself.”

“I do wish there was another way. Tensions ran high, I’m afraid – but we _can_ still work together.”

Silence.

“I owe you an apology about using the vaccine. It’s clear that you care for her well being a great deal.”

Carlos shook his head. “Whatever.”

He turned his back and wandered to the sink, a small circular metal basin set against the wall under a rectangular mirror. Carlos’ hair, the hair his mother would always chide him for not cutting but always seemed to run her fingers through when she thought he was asleep, was gone, clipped close to his scalp. Without it his face looked severe and angular, he thought, overtaken by the dark overgrowth of his eyebrows and long, thick eyelashes. He’d tried to cut those eyelashes with safety scissors when he was child, tired of being called “pretty”. He’d have given anything to not be pretty, but tough and stoic like his _papai_. Now that tough and stoic were his only choices, Carlos didn’t feel proud or happy; he felt trapped.

Carlos cupped his hands under the running faucet and splashed his face with water. The corpse of a black eye had rotted into a yellow crescent moon over his right cheek, his bottom lip split in two places and clotted back together with black scabs. His nose hurt, and he grabbed it between his forefinger and thumb, jiggled it to test for a break. His beard was the only recognizable part of him that remained; shaved clean but refusing to relent, it had already filled in the bottom half of his face with dark, coarse, sharp hair. Whoever had been shaving it had apparently met their match and let it linger, a fight Carlos had given up the minute the Marine Corps was in his rear-view mirror. 

“Whether it feels like it or not,” the man continued, “We’re doing what’s best for everyone, here. You can help a great many people, Mr. Oliveira. The antibodies in your blood, your battle experiences, data on the bioweapons themselves, rate of mutation, all of it. You’re in a unique position to strike a series of killing blows against Umbrella’s bioweapon division. We just want to help you harness them in a way that will make sure it actually stays dead.” 

Carlos rubbed his forehead. This all sounded good — this was what he wanted. What _they_ wanted. It still felt less like volunteering to help save the world, and more like having your arm twisted behind your back while someone beat you with a baseball bat.

Over Carlos’ shoulder, in the mirror, was the reflection of something bright; a calendar on the wall in the next office over, under a glossy color print of a picturesque autumn scene, had x’s drawn through consecutive dates up to October 7th.

“What day is it?” Carlos asked, and approached the barricade again, his eyes on the wall.

“The seventh of October,” Dr. Behara responded.

“Six… I was out for _six days_?”

“There was some pharmaceutical assistance on that score,” the doctor said, “but yes. We kept you sedated for the most common incubation period without grievous injuries or blood contamination in our subjects, which is 5 days.” Then, by way of explanation, “To protect both the staff and yourself.”

Carlos considered this. “I’m no doctor, but I ain’t stupid. If antibodies were all you needed, you would’ve gotten them by now.” Carlos indicated his head with a point. “I’m thinkin’ you need what’s in here more, or you would’ve put a bullet in me. You’ve had a week to do both of ‘em.”

“Absolutely,” he said, “Your knowledge of battle tactics and survival would be quite useful to us as well. Your history with both Umbrella and the _Araguaia_ , for example.”

It was a low blow; the absolute lowest, and the name itself made the blood in Carlos’ face run cold, then blistering hot, the room suddenly clinging to him like the air had been sucked out and he was vacuum-sealed inside with his memories and their emotions, unable to move. Any mention of his time in Brazil was linked with intimate and tragic closeness to the pleading voice of his mother, the way she assured him through tears that victory was certain and everything would be okay again, food would be plenty, water would be clean, and everyone would have shoes and medicine if he would just be brave. Brave like his _papai_. 

Carlos was so small he had to look up at her in those days, his rifle almost taller than he was.

“What they did to you as a child was despicable,” the doctor continued. “We know that, and we’re prepared—”

“You like rules, lets talk rules,” Carlos said, leaning so close to the barricade that his forehead almost touched it, his hands spread against its cool smoothness. His voice was low and calm despite the murderous trapped-animal anger he suddenly felt. Something in that tone, something in the change, also changed the way the doctor looked at him; it was the expression of a guy who’d gotten too used to giving orders and not following them, dishing out disrespect and always being saved from its consequences by the letters in front of his name. Someone who was now realizing that money and prestige and a plastic barricade couldn’t save you forever, not if someone wanted to really hurt you. “You don’t ever talk to me again about Brazil. Ever.”

The doctor opened his mouth to speak.

“ _Ever_.” Carlos said. 

The air was still and heavy with all manners of ugliness that went unspoken but somehow received. 

The man beside the doctor, the man with all the chest candy and the suspicious squint, spoke for the first time.

“Watch it,” he said.

The doctor waved to him; _no, its okay_ , the gesture said.

“Loud and clear, Mr. Oliveira.” Dr. Behara said. “Off the table.”

Unsatisfied, Carlos pushed away from the glass and waited for his heart to slow.

“Two weeks,” Carlos said, “I need guarantee of her safety. But after that, you got fourteen days, then I’m out of here.” 

“Surely,” spoke the stone-faced man beside Dr. Behara, his voice deep and projected as a matter of habit, “but you also need to do something for us.”

Carlos squinted at him. “The fuck are you talking about?”

“You want information, you want her safety, fine. But if we’re doing you a favor, you’ll have to give us something back.”

“Did you just miss this entire conversation?” Carlos asked.

“I heard,” the Captain said, “but you’re in no position to make demands. If you haven’t noticed, you’re behind the glass, not us.”

Dr. Behara’s expression was solemn, his eyes averted, silent.

Carlos considered this. “And what exactly are you needin’ from me? My car stereo?” 

“Funny,” the Captain said, unamused, “but we have uses for men who make it through a clusterfuck like Raccoon City and come out the other side in one piece.”

“Oh, no,” Carlos laughed again, “not just no, but _fuck no_. I did my time with Uncle Sam. There’s no fuckin’ way. The agreement was for information.”

“And now it’s changing. Do you want a guarantee of her safety, or don’t you? Because last I saw, she was in a predicament much worse than yours — and its funny how easy tubes can get disconnected when one forgetful nurse decides to skip her rounds. Don’t you agree, Dr. Behara?”

Dr. Behara didn’t speak, didn’t raise his eyes.

The man in the uniform held Carlos’ gaze for a long, long time, both silent.

“You talk a big game like you’re so much better than Umbrella,” Carlos said, “but you’re just as fuckin’ evil as they are.”

“Hard to win a war from the high ground,” the man said, “give us your answer after you’ve thought about it — but I’d suggest you do it soon.”

***

Carlos gave them every fluid his body contained, multiple times — urine samples (which he didn’t think would be clean considering he and Tyrell’s habit of victory blunts after coming back from the field with all their limbs, but the test somehow came back negative), saliva swabs, samples of other stuff he wasn’t sure why they needed but they insisted on. He ran sprints on an outdoor track, and they timed him. They measured how many push-ups he could do, how many times he could touch his chin to a bar using just the strength in his arms. Boot shit. They always seemed so impressed that he’d managed to blow past the same fitness test he’d met as a gangly, pimpled 18-year-old, and he wasn’t sure what to tell them that didn’t make him sound like an asshole.

On the last day, the doctor gave Carlos a legal pad to write down his contact information. Dr. Behara slipped it into the pocket of his lab coat.

“We’ll contact you when we need you to come back to D.C., but for now, you’re free to do what you like.” He leaned close, then, conspiratorial. “Make sure this number stays valid.”

Carlos waited as long as he could. He waited for days that rolled into weeks, waited while the frenetic spray of color that was Autumn faded to grey and white. With eventual resignation, the day after Halloween he’d looked at his cell phone that sat, still on the table of his hotel room. It hadn’t moved a single time, not a buzz, not a jingle. 

Afforded the luxury of distance and time’s dampening effect on even the hottest of blood, Carlos heard Tyrell’s voice in the back of his mind: _Have you thought about what you’re gonna do if she’s not there? We’ve gotta start thinking of our own extraction plan._

Carlos decided then that her silence was his answer. That day after she’d dozed off against him — a simple, innocent gesture — had seemed enough for Jill to realize that she didn’t want him anywhere near her. He had misread the situation, and though he wanted something wildly different, Carlos wasn’t the type to beg. He had options. If you decided you didn’t want to be one of those, wanted him out, he was out, no questions asked. 

It hurt. It hurt like a bitch. But, that was life sometimes. You could do everything right and it not mean a damn thing — he had done what he’d set out to do, a good deed for someone else who needed it. She didn’t owe him shit, and he wasn’t gonna be one of those assholes who acted like she did.

Carlos booked a plane ticket for the next day, and went home.

New York was the same as it had ever been; bustling and vivid under stacks of neon lights and the squall of street performers, not prepared to give one single of an iota of a fuck about whatever pain you were feeling in the river-rush of people and activity. The hustle of the city had always given him life, fed into his optimism and energy — there was always something to do, always something to see, always someone new to meet. Things happened here, life was _lived_ , not just survived. 

But Carlos didn’t want things, he didn’t want experiences, he didn’t want to go outside. He just wanted to be alone to sort through things. For the first time in his life, silence and solitude sounded nice, maybe not even nice — vital, necessary. He looked up to the towering buildings, the imposing skyline, and felt strange in his own skin.

Someone banged into him, sent him stumbling.

“Watch out, ya fuckin’ idiot!” The man yelled.

Home sweet home.

When he’d been in the city about a week, people started calling. His mother, of course, upset that he’d been home for days and not come by; some of his boys, who invited him out for drinks, which he’d declined, citing being sick; and one that stood out. 

One Carlos’ old friends called him up. Someone had seen him at one of their old spots — could she come over? She could bring dinner, and they could catch up. 

Carlos knew what “catching up” meant. They’d known each other for years, someone initially being the boyfriend or girlfriend of someone’s friend or cousin or something like that. He’d forgotten, by now. Though they wanted vastly different things out of life, they’d shared a mutual physical attraction that they’d agreed they could act upon with no strings attached whenever they were both in town. She was pretty and fun and had her own thing, never made it weird — he decided that maybe this is what he needed. Get over someone by getting under someone else. It had always worked before.

That night, after dinner was eaten and TV shows were watched, she’d gone after him first, climbing onto his lap and suffocating him with kisses that were so hard that they stole his breath. Eventually, she stopped, and pulled away.

“Okay, so, I’m just gonna ask. Are… you okay?” She asked, squinting at him. Carlos blinked at her.

“Uh, definitely,” he said, “are you?”

She looked at him in a strange way, like she didn’t quite believe him. 

“You just seem kind of… you know, like… not here. Do you want me to…?” She gestured to the door.

“No,” Carlos said, “no, no. No, it’s okay. Sorry, work has been…” _terrifying, traumatizing, exhausting, heartbreaking_ “work has been kickin’ my ass. No, you’re okay.”

She still watched him.

“What?”

She shook her head, and climbed off of him. “This is too weird. I feel like I’m, like, raping you, or something. You’re usually — you know, _into it_ , by now.”

Carlos gleaned her meaning, and, a touch insulted, rubbed his face. He thought, for a long moment. “Yeah, it’s late, maybe...”

“Yeah,” she agreed, “I’ll uh… I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

That was a lie, and he knew it. “Be careful goin’ home.”

“Yeah.” She left him by himself with the scent of her body spray and lingering heat. Carlos sighed. 

“Great job, dumbass,” he said, and sulked for a moment, pride injured. He picked up her neglected leftovers, and finished watching the episode on the TV, secretly thankful to be alone again. 

This was going to be harder than he thought.

The cell phone, a hard, rectangular piece of navy blue plastic, buzzed and rattled against the table top so hard that Carlos almost dropped his food, spilled fried rice on his lap. He put the foil package back onto the table and picked the phone up, hit the green phone receiver button, and put it to his face, annoyed.

“Yeah, hello?”

“Mr. Oliveira — this is Liutenant Granger, from the FBC. Your screen came back clean. You’re scheduled to start training next Monday at 0600 at Anacostia-Bolling. Bring your Social Security Card and your Driver’s License. We’ll have more information when you get here. You’ll be flying by American, here’s your ticket number —” he read off a string of digits Carlos scribbled on a nearby receipt — “we’ll see you on Monday.”

Click.

This is what he wanted — to bring Umbrella down, some kind of tangible action to bring someone to justice. But it didn’t feel tangible. It felt like those days he tried to forget, under the whiz of flying bullets in the lurid jungle heat, a rifle gripped in sweaty palms, being told you were fighting for something noble, something just, but always being forced to do someone else’s bidding. 

More than that, something elemental had been kicked out from under him; he didn’t feel at home, comfortable, or safe anywhere. Things that used to bring him happiness and peace now were strange and distant, like he was living someone else’s life, stepped back, out of his own body.

Carlos realized, with belated resignation, that he was. For the first time in his young life, alone in this apartment with the ghost of vanilla-coconut on the air and a rerun of _The X-File_ s on the TV, he understood with intimate closeness what it meant to not be able to go back — that when some doors shut, they were meant to stay that way. 

***

In those months, Jill awoke exactly once. The room ebbed and flowed like something impermanent. Somewhere to her right, something beeped, with regular rhythm. Over her face stood a woman, clad in a teal-green paper gown and a matching hat, her face covered with a mask that looped behind her ears. Jill reached up to her.

“Help,” Jill tried to say, but her throat wouldn’t move. She reached up for the woman, and missed; Jill’s arm pawed at the air in front of her scrubs, and the woman looked down, her eyes concerned.

“She’s awake,” the woman said, with a start, “Doctor, she’s awake.”

Jill lifted her head. A huddle of men in the same scrubs leaned over her feet; the skin of her right leg was split down the middle from knee to toe, skin and flesh laid open, the flaps pinned to either side of her prone leg like a taxidermy bird, or perhaps a frog that you’d dissect in a biology class; the vital red of her tissue, the gummy pink tendons on full display. Jill felt no pain, but started to hyperventilate, staggered onto her elbows. She tried to move her leg but everything below her waist was numb, heavy.

“What are you… what are you… _what the fuck are you doing_?”

She screamed for help, tried to crawl away backwards. The doctors leaned over her with their gleaming scalpels pointed and yelled for something with the ending _-fol_. The nurse turned, grabbed a syringe off the table; she jammed it into the clear liquid chamber of the IV. Within seconds, Jill’s arms refused to move. She tried to cry out, tried to scream for anyone to hear, but her mouth remained still. Her head hit the bed, the sound of the oxygen over her face hissed, soft and cool, over the sound of her pounding heartbeat. 

“It’s okay,” the woman said, stroked her hair. “It’s okay. I know it’s scary, but it’s okay. Just go back to sleep.”

Under the strokes of the nurse’s fingers and the hiss of the oxygen, the world ceased to exist again.

***

The first thing Jill heard on that frigid morning was a voice, was a deep male voice, close by. He was having a discussion with the high-pitched tones of a woman somewhere in the foggy periphery. Jill couldn’t hear what they were saying. One of them laughed, and it made her stir — their conversation stopped. Something warm and dry and strong wrapped around her fingers.

“Jill,” said the male voice, now above her, close, “Jill. Jill, can you hear me? I think she’s awake. Go get the doctor.”

Jill stirred. “Carlos?” She said, her voice slurred muffled beneath the plastic mask that puffed cold air against her face, “Carlos, where… what did…”

“Shh,” said the voice. “Try not to talk.”

Jill opened her eyes. When the room stopped spinning, a face, concerned and watchful, broke into a smile that reached its eyes, dark green and tired. 

“Hey,” Chris said. He brushed her hair from her face. “Morning.” His face, handsome and peppered with stubble, was jarring; Jill felt like she was in some sort of dream, or maybe had just awakened from a long, bad one. Jill’s eyes searched his face in frantic darts. “What…” she looked around, looking for something, someone, that eluded the grasp of her brain, confused and disoriented. “Where?”

Before Chris could respond, the doctor — short, dark skin, black eyes, thinning black hair — entered the room, the nurse behind him. Jill’s eyes focused on the doctor, and she shot upright.

“ _You_ ,” she said, in a snarl. Her voice shook.

Chris looked back and forth between them. “It’s okay, he’s from the FBC. They’ve been helping you.”

“No, she’s right to have her reservations,” said Dr. Behara. “Our first meeting was not a positive one. Hopefully we can now have a conversation about what has transpired, and our next steps.”

“My _next step_ is going to be right up your ass,” she addressed the doctor directly, “ _He killed him_ —” Jill told Chris, “he killed him, and they did things to me, they cut me open and—”

“ _Whoa whoa whoa_. Jill, what are you talking about? Killed who?” Chris turned to the doctor. “Do you know anything about this?”

The doctor sighed, and shook his head; his tepidity was infuriating, as if Jill had overreacted.

“Yes — we did perform surgical corrections on you while you were asleep. You had been infected so long that your fingers, your toes, had started to die, a normal reaction of the body when deprived of oxygen for long periods of time. We had to graft new blood vessels, but luckily, your internal organs were fine. And we didn’t kill anybody, if you’re referring to the man who was with you, when…” the doctor paused, “when we met.”

Jill ignored the excuses. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He left, as soon as his quarantine ended.”

The air left Jill’s lungs in a swoop. She looked down. “How long have I been out?”

“Close to three months,” Chris said, “right?”

The nurse nodded. “Right. As of Tuesday, I think.”

Jill’s lips moved without words, her eyes vacant. Three months. Three entire months, lost. She looked at her hands, stripped off the sheet to look at her feet; pale scars, bisecting her forearms to her wrists, from her knees to the tops of her feet, stared back at her, souvenirs from travels she hadn’t agreed to attend. 

“Three months? You kept me out for _three months_?”

“You must understand — the amount of surgeries, then surgeries to correct those, then waiting for your T-virus titers to fall, collecting the requisite blood samples to reverse-engineer the vaccine you were given… it takes time. We’re not even halfway done, but now you’re out of the mutation stage.”

Chris watched this exchange, a hand over his mouth, one eyebrow cocked. Jill looked to him. “Did you know about this?” 

“Can you give us a minute?” He asked the doctor.

“Of course. Please take your time.” The nurse and the doctor both left the room, closed the door behind them.

Jill looked at Chris, sitting by her bedside, his brown hair mussed and unstyled, dressed in a pair of jogging pants and a t-shirt. A duffel bag sat by the door — he’d been here a while.

Overwhelmed, Jill put her hands over her face, and was overtaken by a peal of silent sobs that shook her chest. 

Chris made a sound, a curse in definition but sympathetic in tone, and he gathered her into his arms. She cried for hours, it felt like, while he held her.

“I’m so sorry,” Chris said. He leaned his face on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here. I’m so sorry, Jill.”

Jill looked around the room, squinted through swollen tears, over the line of his shoulder. The room was empty, save for them. She pulled away, and Chris wiped her face with his thumbs. 

“The man you were with…” Chris said. “That’s Carlos, right? You were asking for him when you woke up.”

Jill nodded, sniffled. “They… they drugged me, and then they… I think they shot him. I saw them dragging him away, and then…”

“We’ll figure it out,” Chris said, rubbed her back, “it’ll be okay.”

The disconnect of his words, the gentle way he brushed her worries aside… Jill searched Chris’ face, confused. Chris pulled her close while the final tears rolled and she buried her head against his shoulder. 

The feeling of being violated, of being weak and confused and adrift, triggered something deep in Jill’s brain — it looked for him, his dark hair that stood up away from his head in loops in cowlicks; the feeling of security that followed him, like a rampart around a castle that caught slings and arrows. Though Chris held her, tight and warm and strong, Jill had never felt so vulnerable, or so alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter I have already written, and after this, we'll move to the weeklies. <3 Hopefully you guys have been enjoying the absolute crush of stuff I've thrown at you so far, and we'll see you next Saturday with an update!


	4. Call Off Your Ghost

  
November 16, 1998

  
Leaving New York felt like leaving a sleeping lover. Carlos slipped out under the cover of the chill November night, without even so much as a goodbye, and was relieved when the city did not move to stop him or demand answers. 

If you were to ask him what he’d expected from that trip back to Washington D.C., Carlos couldn’t have told you. He knew the experience of military training, of course, being loaded onto a cramped bus with twenty other sweaty, nervous men. He knew endless push-ups in the rain and being screamed at by drill instructors, red faces shining and spit flying. There was no bus, this time, just the quiet, muffled coo of surrounding conversations on a plane lit with racing stripe bulbs down a long aisle, a window seat, and his own thoughts to pass the time.

When Carlos stepped off the plane, down the narrow metal stairs and up the makeshift hallway that shuddered and shook with the wind, a man in a pair of blue jeans and a leather motorcycle jacket waited outside the rope barricades with a sign on white bristol board that just said “CARLOS”. The man chomped a piece of gum, his attention distracted by his cell phone, against which his thumb tapped with quick, practiced precision. Carlos loitered until the flight emptied and the people scattered; some ran for the arms of waiting loved ones just beyond the gate, and some hustled with tunnel-vision focus to their next destination, carry-ons braced against tired shoulders and backs. Carlos approached the man, who didn’t look up.

“Hey,” Carlos said, “you taking any Carlos that applies, or you looking for a specific one?”

The man looked up at him. His gray eyes brightened, distracted from his distraction. “Oly… vera? Aloe-vera? Did I get it?”

“Olly-viera. But you got close.” Carlos extended a hand. The man clapped his own into it and shook, tight and quick. “How you doing?”

“Hey buddy, Kevin Ryman. We woulda sent one of our office staff to get you, but we don’t… have any of those. So I’m your tour guide for now. C’mon, I got a car outside.”

Kevin’s casual nature and conspicuous lack of pretense was a relief; Carlos was expecting men in three-piece suits, button-lipped and stoic, impenetrable. Kevin reminded him of the dudes in high school, the ones who smoked Marlboro Reds behind the gym and blasted hair metal from their shitty hand-me-down cars, down to the scent — a pointed, chemical mix of cigarette smoke, mint gum and cheap cologne. Kevin bundled the sign into a stiff crumple and dumped it into a nearby trash can as they walked. 

“So we got a few things to cover upfront,” Kevin said, triple-tasking; he was walking, texting on his phone, and holding a conversation, “first off, the guys know about your old gig.”

Great. “That gonna be a problem?”

“Not gonna lie to you, probably,” they approached the revolving metal grate of an escalator, and Kevin hopped on, his black canvas sneakers pinging against the metal. He shoved his phone in his jacket pocket, now focused on his guest. “That’s a fresh wound, bud, and everyone’s got a pound of flesh they wanna take out of your old bosses’ ass — that’s why they’re here. You’re probably gonna have to do some first aid to get ‘em trust you. But you weren’t a scientist, or a big-wig, or whatever, so it shouldn’t be a death sentence. Just be cool and they’ll be cool. Eventually.”

“That mean you’re cool?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Just be straight with me and I’ll be straight with you. I’ve no problems with anybody, man.”

Carlos let this information pass, unafraid; he was up for the challenge, charged with the confidence of a man who’d been on the positive side of social interactions his entire life. Getting people to trust him wasn’t a problem. Never had been. “Okay. And what’s the second thing?”

“We uh… don’t really have an office yet,” Kevin said, “just more of a… table?”

“That don’t bother me. Table’s an upgrade from some places I’ve been.”

“Oh! Awesome. It’s even got a space heater dude, you’ll feel like you’re at the Ritz.”

As soon as Carlos’ bags were collected from the wide, turning belts of a carousel on the bottom level of the airport, as soon as the front door hissed open with a dramatic sound of hydraulics, Kevin spit his gum in a trash can and shoved a hand in his pocket, fished out a pack of smokes. He offered one to Carlos, and when the larger man declined, Kevin lit the tip of his own with two practiced trick-swoops of a brass lighter. They circled over the rainy pavement, against a cold that swirled and danced and desperately wanted to be snow but seemed unable to commit, to where a red sportscar with rental tags was double-parked. It was the kind of car that made Carlos think _of course this is what this dude drives,_ not unkindly. They ducked inside, shivering and rubbing their hands.

“You ready?” Kevin asked. “No goin’ back now.”

Carlos buckled his seat belt. “Always ready. Lets do it.”

“You know, I like you,” Kevin said, around his cigarette. They squealed away into the rainy November afternoon, and for not the first time even today, Carlos had no idea what the fuck was going to happen — but he felt better about fitting into whatever plans lie ahead.

They pulled up to the base after stopping for food, or what barely passed for it, burgers from some greasy fast food joint on the way. Kevin hadn’t lied; while Carlos was expecting some grand, intimidating environment, the reality was not as overwhelming. They wound through stark, joyless brick-and-tile hallways, past young men and women in camouflage uniforms, and Kevin led him to a single, heavy metal door. He searched his key ring, came back with the right key after a few non-starts, and opened it with a creak. Inside was a hangar, empty and forgotten with its massive bay door closed, against one wall a circular metal table, ringed with benches. Five sets of eyes looked up from their work, watched the men in silence, leaning back, hands on their thighs, their conversation forgotten. A popular song buzzed in the background from a boom box on the floor, the notes overlaid by static that echoed into the stillness.

“Why do I get the feeling every single one of them wants to kick my ass?” Carlos asked.

“They probably do,” Kevin shrugged, then called out, “Alright, listen up! This is the new guy. Don’t be an asshole, he’s cool.”

“You tell the Captain he’s here?” One of the men asked.

“Eh, he’ll find out eventually,” Kevin said, and sat down. “C’mon, park it, we got shit to do.”

Carlos sat, under the weight of watchful eyes and silence. Kevin, perhaps also sensing the heavy foreboding, scratched his head and turned to Carlos.

“You got an idea of what they’re gonna have you doing here?”

“Not sure, but I was EOD,” Carlos said, “just gimme something that goes boom and I’ll make it sing for you. Or make it shut up, if that’s what you want.”

Kevin smiled the creeping grin of someone who’s done a good job and is just waiting for someone else to recognize it. “Heavy, huh? Fuck yeah. That makes shit a _lot_ easier.”

“…we have been needing one of those.” Said one of the men — a blond kid — with reluctance.

“Here I am,” Carlos said, spreading his hands. “The answer to your prayers.”

“Well, Heavy,” said one of the men on his other side; the man leaned down to where a large tupperware bumper sat, picked it up with a grunt, then slammed it down by Carlos. It was filled with microchips of varying sizes, plastic casings, stray colorful wires, tubes and switches. “Start by making these sing. They’re all broken, and we don’t have the money for new ones. Soldering iron and goggles’re on the desk somewhere.”

Carlos stared at the bumper, and the days— possibly weeks — of work within its plastic walls. “Sure,” he said, “lemme go get ‘em.”

They spent the day working around the table, chatting over the boombox tuned to a nearby radio station; Kevin messed with one particularly stubborn pistol, its slide catching on something internal. The kid on the other side of the table didn’t say much, standoffish in the way that someone adapts because its easier to deal with than natural shyness, but leaned to watch him, began to ask questions. Carlos hunkered over the microchips, melting their broken circuits back together under a magnifying glass rigged up on a moving arm. He stayed away from the conversation unless invited, and when he’d look up to speak, eyes would be watching him, then cut away.

Though the work was tedious and the atmosphere tense, something about these guys struck Carlos as decent. Thankful for a sense of direction, Carlos worked under the floating strains of AC/DC and Kevin’s firearm lessons, and, surrounded by the rough camaraderie of men tilted toward a common purpose, felt more normal than he had in months.

  
***

  
January 4, 1999

  
The morning broke, cold and hard and white. Jill sat, her bare legs hung over the side of her bed, and watched the sunrise from the picture window. Yesterday was hard to remember, they way whirlwinds of emotions often were; she remembered in a vague way crying, feeling sorry for herself, the feeling of being lost. She’d given herself a day to acknowledge it and let it pass — more than it deserved. 

Those emotions had been stuffed down for months under the impersonal strangle of duty, a feeling of something _more important_ that had to be done, things that grabbed great handfuls of her hair and pointed her face at anything but her own circumstances. They’d circled her, banging at her windows and her doors, coming to her in dreams, when she was alone. Jill had boarded those windows, those doors, patched them with work and goals and anger, but the feelings eventually found their path of least resistance, leaking into cracks and breaks in her resolve. They found their way in.

Jill slid her backside off of the bed, slow at first, tentative. She touched a bare foot to the cold, smooth floor tiles. She tried to lean some weight on that foot and her leg shook, unsure. She took a breath in, pushed herself to a stand that wobbled and trembled; she swung her arms for balance that was hard-won, but won nonetheless. Step one was done.

Jill lifted her right foot, placed it in front of her. Then the other, until the wall across the room was in front of her, and she leaned against it for breath. She walked to the door, her steps more sure and unafraid as she took them, and turned the door’s long, silver knob, pulled it open. She walked in her gown, drafty and thin, down the hall, until a broad wooden desk came into view. Behind it two women in boxy paper scrubs chatted, laughed, drank out of plastic tumblers emblazoned with monograms. A few nurse’s aides in polos and khakis — the women who brought and collected Jill’s lunch trays, she realized — joined the conversation, spoke in Southern twangs about topics Jill wasn’t close enough to hear.

One of the nurses behind the desk spotted Jill and jumped into action, sidled out from behind the desk.

“Here, baby, let me help,” the nurse approached Jill with her hands outstretched.   
“I’m fine,” Jill said, “I can walk. I need some exercise.”  
“Is she supposed to be up yet?” Mumbled one of the women in the polos; another shrugged, eyes wide.

The nurse still seated picked up the phone receiver, and spoke to someone in a strange breed of clinical ambivalence, her eyes on Jill.

“At least let me walk with you,” the nurse beside her said. “I need some more coffee, anyway. You want some coffee?”

Jill opened her mouth to refuse the offer, but the magic word gave her pause. “Coffee… does sound pretty good.”

“Yeah? Let’s go get some. I can show you where.”

They walked through the facility, the nurse watchful, tensed and ready for a tumble that never came. They walked past rooms obscured by closed curtains on circular runners in the ceiling, past doors that said Laboratory — Authorized Employees Only and places that warned of no entry without hazmat suits. The cafeteria was far but the muscles of Jill’s legs ached with a thankful, progressive strength. They poured themselves paper cups of coffee and walked back, the nurse’s thick-soled sneakers squeaking against the floor over the subdued patter of Jill’s bare feet. 

Outside of Jill’s closed door waited the familiar figure of Dr. Behara, ever present in his crisp white lab coat and dress pants. Jill wondered when the man ever slept — if he did.

“Doctor,” Jill said, “good morning.”

“It certainly is,” he smiled, and gestured for her to enter the room first. “After you. Thank you, nurse.”

Jill sipped her coffee as she entered, took a slow, careful seat on the edge of her bed. The doctor turned on the back row of lights, dim and milky, and closed the door. He pulled up a chair and sat across from Jill, his legs crossed.

“Your dedication is impressive.”

“I might have been told that before.”

The doctor laughed. “I’m sure you have.”

Jill swallowed her coffee, bitter and hot and life-giving. “Do you have anything medical to discuss with me, or is this the good cop part of your routine?”

“I don’t fault you your suspicion — I understand it will take some time to establish a sense of trust between us.”

Jill noted this as front-runner for understatement of the century, but said nothing.

“Medical, yes, among many other things. We have much to discuss.”

“Sounds serious.”

“Very much so. Clearly, we are not to the point quite yet where we can clear you for field work. But — your recovery has been nothing short of a medical anomaly, and we’d like some further time to study you.”

“And if I say no?”

Doctor Behara fixed Jill with a look that was steady, and, she thought, a touch desperate. He sat back, looked over his shoulder, and then leaned, locked the door from the inside. He pulled his chair close to her.

“I’ll be missed soon, so I must make this quick. You are our first case of full recovery from the T-virus. I know who you are and where you’re from. The United States government is in the preliminary stages of suing to disband Umbrella, but the evidence is thin — destroyed. You are the FBC’s only evidence that the T-virus existed, let alone what it could do to a human body, let alone that it was connected to Umbrella. Everything else is gone, along with Raccoon City.”

It dawned on Jill with gradual, eventual clarity. “Ah. You couldn’t keep me awake, because I could deny the medical treatment you were using to collect the evidence.” It was smart. Immoral — highly _illegal_ — but smart, in a twisted sort of way.

“It’s up to you, ultimately,” Dr. Behara said, “but I implore you to stay nearby. In the city, if you can, but preferably, here. This might be the only shot we get at them.”

Jill considered this, her lips over the rim of her coffee cup against the steam. 

“We — _I_ — have a contact we need you to speak to. She has information, journalistic connections, she says, first-hand footage, but an interview with a survivor of both incidents could be what blows the case wide open, and actually take it to tri—”

“I’ll do it.” Jill interrupted.

The doctor blinked. “I… well… that would be…” his smile was relieved, “a huge help. Massive, in fact.”

“That’s me — helpful. Is that it?”

The doctor stood up, and seemed to remember himself, halfway to the door. “There is something else.” 

Jill glanced up at him, uninterested, until it caught her eye — a slip of yellow paper, a telephone number written between its lines. 

“I wasn’t sure how appropriate this would have been. Keep in mind I don’t have any sort of judgment, and it’s none of my business. But… I made a deal. You should know that he… they very much wanted you to have this, and I wasn’t supposed to give it to you. That’s all I can say.” 

Jill had seen drug deals go down with less tension, less nervousness. She looked at the paper, accepted it with tentative confusion, then called to the doctor as he left.

“Who is this?”

“It’s… someone who cares about your wellbeing very much, and tried to protect you at possible cost to themselves. If that indicates a single person in your mind, then… that’s most likely who you’re thinking of.” He smiled, awkward, on his way out the door. “I can say no more. Good day, Miss Valentine.”

There were many people that fit that first description — Chris, intrepid and emotional, or perhaps Barry, with his warm, paternal nature and his chugging laugh. There were a cast of people who had cared for her, protected her, even tried to guide her, each for their own reasons. But only one returned, over and over again, cropped up exactly when he was needed, devoid of ulterior motive. Jill became aware of her own hope as one does when a coin is flipped into the air, and what one really wants becomes clear, given the opportunity for random chance to take it away.

The feeling wasn’t a surprise, but it was new in its purity, its intensity, its sudden eventuality. 

She decided to call that night and make sure.

  
***

  
January 4, 1999

  
Somewhere far away, beers were emptied and refilled as loud rock music blared over a jukebox. The room was choked with thick coils of cigarette smoke, the rowdy whoops and cheers of the bar’s patrons, and the chalky clatter of pool balls being hit into nets with drunken disregard of accuracy or rules.

“Alright, square up,” Kevin said, and pulled up his pants by the thighs, “you’re about to get your world rocked.”

Carlos leaned his face on his hand. “Well? Get to rockin’, big daddy. You’ve been stallin’ for like ten minutes now.”

“HEY!” Kevin yelled, held up a hand. “You can’t rush genius. Don’t distract me.”

“Just throw the fuckin’ dart, chicken.”

“Bawk bawk, bitch!” Kevin let it fly. It thumped against the board, buried deep in nowheresville halfway between the bullseye and the silvery edge of the board itself. “Alright, warm up shot. This is the real one.”

Carlos’ phone rumbled in his pocket, the intense vibration adamant against the bone of his hip. Carlos dug it out, and checked the number displayed on the glowing rectangle of its face; it was a number he didn’t recognize. Work, maybe. He sighed, and hit the end button. The Captain promised them Friday nights to Monday mornings off, every weekend shoreside, and it was an allowance Carlos was prepared to exploit to its fullest. The phone rang again as soon as he’d hung up, before it was replaced in his pocket, and he looked at it with a strange breed of annoyance.

“Some asshole’s blowin’ me up, I gotta go take this. I’ll be back.” Carlos said, and stood up.

“Sure, run away. I’d be emasculated too by all this _raw, unadulterated accuracy_!” Another dart hit the board, further away this time. “Shit!”

Carlos shrugged his jacket on, heavy black wool, then turned to squeeze himself towards the door through the crowd of people, tall glasses of beer and liquor brandished in cheers and toasts. As soon as he opened the door, the sub-zero temperatures slapped at his face and stung at his skin, and a graceless swirl of snow blew in the door. Carlos huddled under his jacket for warmth, trudged along the cement sidewalk that was only half-shoveled, leaned against the wall next to a group of drunk people engaged in loud conversation. His boots sunk into the snow, through the thin crust of ice settled on top, and he hit the “accept call” button, braced for a conflict.

“Yeah, this is Carlos.” 

There was silence; he could hear breath, on the other line. He furrowed his brows and looked at the phone. 

“Hello?”

“Carlos, it’s… it’s me.” The voice was female, strong and distinct. There was a note of hesitation in that voice, and she cleared her throat, a soft sound, away from the receiver. 

Carlos’ heart jumped at the exact second his brain implored restraint; the two forces collided somewhere in the middle, left him hopeful and nervous in equal parts. There were a few women who could have called like this, could have suggested he knew who “me” was, even after the passage of time had worked its ambivalent amnesiac dance. He tried to pretend he didn’t know the voice, if only to keep his own still. But he did.

“I don’t know a ‘me’,” he said, “you’ll have to be more specific or I’m hangin’ up.”

“It’s… it’s me. Jill,” she said, and laughed, a humorless shake of nerves. He thought she sounded relieved, maybe. “It’s really good to hear your voice.”

In truth, Carlos had thought of what he’d say if this moment had come to pass. _Was I just not important enough to even say goodbye to before you fucked off?_ and _Look I know why you did it, can we still be friends?_ , any other number of responses that spanned the gamut from offended on behalf of one’s wounded pride to the extension of an olive branch. In an ultimate appeal to the tepid waters of good sense, he’d decided that a week was not enough time to decide she’d deserved any of those reactions, or that’d he’d deserved an explanation. 

Carlos settled on nothing, lacking the clarity to formulate a response, the warm plastic of the phone held against his face. Should he be mad? Should he be grateful? Should he ask what he did, apologize? 

What _could_ he do?

“Are you there?” She asked.


	5. Details in the Fabric

The snow swirled in great blowing loops around the waxy yellow light of the lamppost outside. Jill tangled her fingers in the coiled pigtail cord of the phone as the silence continued. She thought about sitting down in one of the prickly upholstered chairs that faced the window, but thought she’d rather stand. Standing sounded good, as if the act of relaxing would put her at a disadvantage.

“Hey.” Carlos said, the bass-drum kick of his voice subdued behind the quiet rush of a breath being released. “Gimme a minute.”

There was no stupid joke, no nickname, no real conviction at all. Jill was alone with the muffled sounds of crunching snow under his feet, the puff of his breath against the phone, the high-pitched ding of a car door alarm. That door shut, and the drunken chatter was gone from the other line, now a ghost on the edge of her hearing, in some other world beyond the silence that hung between them for a few more, stretching moments.

Finally, Carlos spoke. 

“Fuck, I’m so glad you’re okay.” There was a softness to his voice, a vulnerability that she thought she may have heard before, but couldn’t place where or when.

“Can we talk?” Jill said. “In person, I mean.”

“You sure you wanna do that?” Carlos’ tone was doubtful. 

Jill struggled; he was reacting in a strange way that confused her, in hesitation and sobriety that seemed wrong for the circumstances. His lightness of spirit, bright and indomitable, was quieted now, muffled and shut away like a thing to be protected.

“Do you?” Jill asked.

Carlos laughed, an unexpected noise, thick with warmth. “Can’t answer a question with a question. Right?”

“Have I ever told you that you’re infuriating?” The smile in her voice gave her away; the silence on the other end of the line felt almost companionable, like she could somehow hear him smiling, too. She felt the crest of something important that had been missing, returning in fits and stumbles, being dug out of the cold dirt in pieces to be reassembled. “Of course I do — if you’re still nearby.”

“Uh—yeah. Yeah… wait, you wanna do it now?” Then, “You sure?”

“Well, it _is_ cold outside,” Jill said, an attempt to downplay the eagerness in her own suggestion, laying down the red carpet for plausible deniability to make its way through, should it be needed. “In case you waited to, you know, wait…”

“I can do now,” Carlos said, “just tell me where.”

Jill turned then, for reasons she couldn’t place, to the empty hospital room. Chris’ duffel bag — zipped up, proper, and forgotten, parked against the wall — attracted her attention, and her gaze lingered on it for a long, considering beat.

“I think there’s a park by the hospital where I’m staying, where I can get off to for a while.”

“Hospital?” He repeated; it was low and thoughtful, like it could have been a question for either of them. 

“I’ll tell you all about it when I see you,” Jill said, and gave him the directions. “I’ll see you in a bit?”

“Yeah,” Carlos said, finally, “yeah. I’ll see you.”

He hung up, and Jill held the phone receiver to her mouth, alone with the snow and the beeping dial tone.

  
***

The hospital was a pain in the ass to find — Carlos was expecting something larger, more conspicuous — maybe a mirrored Emergency Room with an ambulance bay, lit stark like a beacon against the pressing night, or even directional signs outside. What he found in the dark and snow at the address provided was a squat brick compound with a barren parking lot, visible only because of the lonely pools of its floodlights against the frozen pavement. He circled it, and eventually spotted a nearby Elementary School flying a canvas banner with little stick-figure kids on it, forgotten and empty under the moonlight. There was a jungle gym, a sprawling wooden thing that looked like a pirate ship, and a swing set. A woman in a heavy coat was sitting on one of the swings, dangling back and forth, pushing herself with a foot while she waited, her breath puffing into frigid cartoon bubbles. Carlos stopped, looked over his shoulder, and parallel-parked his car in a practiced, precise maneuver into a lucky space across the street. 

Carlos didn’t get out immediately. He took a deep breath, and though his music was still on, he wasn’t listening. He stared forward at the forest green Jeep in front of him, its dark shell dashed through with a single faded bumper sticker which implored him to vote for Clinton/Gore ‘92. It didn’t normally occur to Carlos to plan what he’d say in situations where emotions were involved; he’d lived his life around the opposite sex in a certain kind of lighthearted improvisation, a tactic which had always worked for him. So when this time when he got the impression he should cook up something — something to lead in with, some kind of ice breaker, some sort of plan, he stopped himself. 

“Fuck it,” Carlos said, pushed himself out of the car, slammed the door. He jammed his big hands into the pockets of his jacket, just over his stomach, and checked both ways across the street before crossing it. When he got close to the figure on the swing, a familiar face turned to him, then away, then back to him in a rapid double-take; Jill’s blue-grey eyes hovered somewhere over his.

“What?” Carlos said, turned and looked around.

“Your hair…” Jill strangled, in disbelief. “ _It’s so short_.”

Carlos ran his hand back and forth over the top of his head. His hair had grown long enough to be shaped up and styled with the blessing of some product and a lot of patience, growing up and away in piles of thick, stubborn curls the color of a raven’s wing. “Courtesy of Uncle Sam. Believe me, feels weirder than it looks.”

“It doesn’t look weird,” she said. Carlos took a seat on one of the swings a foot or so to her side. 

“They didn’t shave _your_ head. This is bullshit.”

“Yours was prettier than mine, too,” she said, “all shiny and curly. I think cutting hair like that is against the Geneva Convention.”

Carlos shook his head, smiled but didn’t look at her. He leaned over, hands clasped between knees spread wide, and watched the cars drift to a stop at the intersection across the street, their headlights a soft, pale yellow blare against the dark and the swirling, thick flutters of snow. People wandered by in their jackets and scarves and hats, clutching collars shut against the cold. The snow fell thick and fast, into fat blankets of soundlessness that insulated the world, made everything feel just a little more close, a little more quiet. A black van slowed to a stop at the red light, its siding reflecting the glow from the lampposts, then was on its way again. 

“So,” he said, “you said you wanted to talk to me. ‘Bout what?”

“I was so sure I knew what. But now that we’re here…” Jill trailed off, “I’m sorry. About the time. And the — the helicopter… thing.”

Carlos knew it would come up, but not that she would be the one to broach it. It must be really bothering her if so much time later, she still felt the need to apologize. 

“Forget about it. We both got tired and weird.” He paused, rocked on his heels, then added, “And _I’m_ sorry for… you know, the arm thing.”

When Jill spoke, it was the hesitant, lilting cadence of words being carefully chosen. “I guess everything that’s happened puts those things in perspective, as little as they seem at the time.”

“Well, consider yourself officially forgiven. Don’t stress about that stuff.” It wasn’t hard to forgive. He’d forgiven her the moment she’d said it. That, however, was his secret to keep. “That all you wanted to talk about?”

“That depends,” She didn’t look up from where her toe had dug the divot in the snow. “How deep do you want to get?” 

“Well — we’re here. Deep as you have to, I guess.”

“I need to ask you something.”

Her newfound hesitance was at clashing odds with her flaming surety; the Jill he’d known insisted, objected, parked her tiny body dead-center of your frame and said _No, fuck you, this is how we’re doing things. Follow along or get the hell out of the way_. Asking for permission wasn’t something he’d assumed she’d made a habit of, and it gave him pause.

Carlos didn’t respond, just looked at her. Jill took this gesture as the invitation it was, and spoke again.

“Why did you give me the vaccine, instead of saving it? I keep turning it over and over in my head, trying to figure it out. Were those your orders?”

There it was. The Big One, The Million Dollar Question, Final Jeopardy. Yes, Alec, What Is “I Still Can’t Fuckin’ Tell You, It Just Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time”?

Carlos leaned back. “Not an order. By that point, we had nobody to take orders from.”

“I guess I just don’t understand why. Can you tell me?”

It occurred to Carlos that they were looking at two completely different situations; he would always have the reliefs and shadows of things he’d done to deliver her to safety, of running against time’s cruel marching indifference, of stopping every twenty minutes to make sure she hadn’t died against his back, that the smell of his hair and the sweat on his neck weren’t the last things she’d felt. He’d been chasing those ghosts away for months, but she was just now realizing their existence, learning their names. Catching up.

“Yeah. Y’know, I thought about this some, but I always go back and forth between never havin’ an answer, one of those clean ones that make sense or sound good when I try to explain it — or I’ve got too many to make sense. Guess it just felt like the right thing to do.” For want of something to fidget with, Carlos pushed his feet against the ground. The swing rocked back in a shallow, low arc, its chain creaking against the anchors overhead. “And, because… I guess…” he fought with this part, and dismissed it, “It’s stupid. It’d probably sound stupid.”

“Dumber than ‘I know what a radio is’?”

Carlos laughed at that, a sudden rush that forced itself out, his first real rib-scraping belly laugh in months. She was looking at him, fighting back a smile, and he scratched his forehead with his thumbnail when it died down. “Alright, alright. It… it just felt like… like people needed you. You know? That you weren’t done. That’s why.”

“Were you one of them?” A halting, unsure sentence, as if she was forcing herself to ask a question she maybe didn’t want the answer to. “One of those people?”

Carlos looked to her, fully prepared to let loose some harmless, smooth lie, one that was true enough to not have to recant if pressed but also untrue enough to save face. For years from that moment, her face in that instant — fair and pretty, framed with soft chestnut hair, her lips and cheeks dark pink from the cold, her eyes on him and only him, so earnest in their request for the truth — burned into his memory like heat lightning. It was the moment he realized he wasn’t able to lie to her, even through omission; not because she’d catch him, but because she wouldn’t, and he wanted to give her more than that. More credit, more honesty, more honor, more.

“Maybe,” he said, then, “is that weird?”

Something in her face changed, just then. It was an expression more delicate than he’d expected, downcast batting eyelashes and a small smile, one that didn’t seem at odds with her grit, but complemented its pieces. It formed a more full picture of her, a luxury outside of places where that grit was necessary. 

“I don’t think so.” She said, “If it is, then I think we’re both weird.”

Carlos laughed, pushed the swing again, moving a foot or so back and forth. “You ever expect to have this conversation with someone you knew for a week?”

“Time doesn’t bother me anymore. It’s a bad judge of character.”

“So now it’s my turn,” Carlos said, stopping himself against the frozen dirt, “you said you wanted to apologize about the time. So… why’d you call now?”

“I didn’t feel safe.” Her expression was guarded, as if expecting him to laugh at her. 

“What, someone giving you a hard time?” It was a stupid question, of course — of all the women in the world, she was the least likely to need intercession if someone was giving her a hard time. But it came out of him all the same, immediate, like a reflex.

“No,” Jill said, “what I mean is — I woke up, and you weren’t there. It felt like I was on my own, and it was… it was scary. Scarier than anything else. I’m used to fighting, or running, or hiding, but you can’t fight that. You just have to be alone with it. And I didn’t want to be alone.”

 _She_ didn’t want to be alone. ”It’s been three months,” he said, more quietly, more seriously than he intended. “Why'd you leave?”

A quiet expression of realization, intermingled with dread, washed over her face.

“It’s cool,” Carlos said, took her silence as an answer, “you don’t gotta… if it’s too personal, I get it. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“I didn’t,” Jill said, “I’ve been _here_. They had me under, to do surgery, and… they didn’t tell you…?”

Carlos shook his head. “They told me that you were worse off than I was, but… that’s it. I waited, but—”

Jill stood, then, the long zipper on the front of her jacket sounding with a sharp, metallic noise. He watched her shrug off the jacket, place it on the swing, step in front of him. She pulled up the sleeves on her sweater, knit thick and warm in white yarn, in a yank. She turned her palms to the sky before him, as if offering them to be handcuffed.

“You don’t gotta—” he stammered.

“Look.” She said. Then, “ _Look_.”

Carlos looked. At first he didn’t see the scars, but once one caught the light they all appeared in a glimmer, long and straight and pale. They ran straight from the crook of Jill’s elbow to her wrist, branching to trail down the inside of each individual finger. He thought they looked a bit like the joints on a puppet or a doll, articulated lines where movement should be. 

Without realizing it, Carlos stood, and his hands were under the delicate lines of her arms, under her wrists, supporting their weight while he tilted them in the light, examining the glossy scar tissue. Her arms were pale as a spirit against the dark fabric of his gloves; the pad of his thumb touched one of the scars, running down its length, a brushing caress that was tentative, as if afraid to break it open.

“I don’t have an explanation,” she said, “I’m still trying to find it, myself. But… I’ve got these. That has to count for something.”

In a rush, the fist curled around the core of hurt that masqueraded as anger in Carlos’ chest released with no real telegraph. Its fire simply trailed onto the cold January wind in a puff of smoke, buried under the piling snow, its heat now cooled under the weight of understanding, of honesty.

“I’m sorry, too.” He said, holding her wrists in his hands. She moved first, rushed him, rocked onto the balls of her feet and pulled him by his neck into a hug. He squeezed her against him as tight as he could, slender and soft and warm, afraid that upon release she’d disappear into a flutter of ashes or maybe snowflakes, a dream cooked up by a brain still helplessly trapped in the throes of heartbreak and mourning. She pulled away and his fingers, thick and strong, trailed against the sides of her waist.

“Now a hug?” He said, “You sure you’re feelin’ better?” 

Jill pushed him. “Moment ruiner. _Chronic_ moment ruiner. Stop laughing at me.”

“Not laughing. Just… startin’ to get the impression you might like havin’ me around, after all. I was startin’ to think maybe you didn’t.”

“I suppose you’re okay.” Then, “You’re not all bad… _all_ the time.”

“Well, compared to ‘fuck you, I know what a radio is’, I’ll take what I can get.”

Jill crinkled her nose, and collected her jacket. “…I’m never living that down, huh?”

“Nope. Stayin’ right in the pocket.”

They exchanged a look and then broke down into a spate of conspiratorial giggles. It might have been the first time he really saw her smile, not a smirk that wanted to be a smile but just couldn’t get there, but smile without the grainy, overexposed filters of fatigue and tension. She had dimples, shallow little divots that pulled against cheeks that rounded with it, and her front teeth curved inwards just a bit. 

“I missed you, you know.” Carlos said. “A lot.”

Carlos expected a rebuke, sharp and firm, some kind of about-face that would slap the taste out of his mouth, tell him he was wrong. None came. 

“I missed you too.” She said, and lingered where she stood. “And… just to correct the record. I didn’t mind it.” 

Carlos raised his eyebrows. “Hm?”

“I actually sort of liked the arm thing. You smell way better now, though.”

Carlos’ brain didn’t so much as recoil as readjust. He watched her as if waiting for further clarification, some declaration of a joke, but she just met his gaze, her blue eyes calm and unafraid. When he settled upon the right thing to say, his phone rang, rumbling against his hip, a sudden _bzzzzzzt-bzzzzzt_ , zapping into the night air. They both sighed in a grimacing sort of way, born of intimate familiarity with bad timing.

“Work?” She asked.

Carlos checked the number on the glowing display. “Work. I gotta take this one.” 

They walked together in silence, over crunching, glittering snow to the sidewalk, where their paths branched.

“It was good to see you,” Carlos said, “thanks for callin’. I mean it. I really needed this.” He gestured to his car with a jab of his thumb. “Give you a ride back?”

Jill shook her head. “I need the exercise. It’s not far.”

“Okay. Be careful.” Carlos turned to walk away, but didn’t get far when her voice stopped him.

“You still owe me dinner, you know,” Jill called to him. “You promised. ‘As soon as we get this bird on the ground’. Remember?”

“Now that you mention it,” Carlos said, pulled back one foot from where it dangled over the curb, and then turned around. “I do seem to remember some talk of… Japanese food?”

“Good memory.”

Carlos shrugged, as if to say, _What can I say? I’m good._ “You should call me again when you’re hungry.”

Jill took the invitation for what it was, and smiled, with a flutter of lashes. “We’ll see.” She ducked her head into the collar of her coat, and was gone, down the street. Carlos watched her retreating form, his phone still buzzing in his hand like an angry insect. He hit the green “accept” button, and took the call.

“Heavy!” Kevin cried into the receiver, over the crushing squall of Def Leppard and the hooting of partygoers. “What the fuck, man, you okay? You left to take a call and you were just gone. You get arrested?”  
“More than good,” Carlos said, “I had a friend who needed my help, but I think I’m gonna head home and sleep.”  
“Wait, hold up. You telling me you left for a booty call?”  
Carlos paused. “Uh… I mean--maybe?”  
"Hm," Kevin said, "okay, that makes a lot more sense."

Kevin hung up and Carlos looked at his phone, let out a frosted puff of laughter. As he approached his car, his hands shoved into his pockets against the cold, he felt a sense of coming together, a sense of symmetry. He had a lot to think about, but at least now the thinking was in his favor. 

Carlos wasn’t paying attention when the black van circled the street again, and then took off into the night.


	6. Tunnel Vision

January 15, 1999

  
A cold snap settled over Washington, and Jill watched the week pass from her room. Endless shakes of snow fell under hard skies the color of steel, at first pretty and ethereal, but now boring, clinical; with a sudden give, something in Jill’s brain tired of white, of cold things, of bleak. Life was moving on, but not fast enough.

Jill could leave and return at her discretion, as long as she signed in and out at the nurse’s station. That trip in early January to the school’s playground was the first time. Jill replayed it in her mind over the ensuing days, at first from a lack of certainty, mainly of her own motivations: in moments of solitude, she turned the conversation over in her mind, tracing fingertips down its gilded edges, looking for something she wasn’t sure existed. She decided that sometimes, there was no hidden meaning. She’d meant what she said, and hadn’t done anything wrong. It still made her unsure for reasons she was hesitant to place, but as the days rolled by, less and less so.

Jill found reasons to venture out, then the venturing itself became the reason. She looked at apartments, visited nurseries to look at spills of brightly-colored flowers and houseplants that hung in baskets from thick brass hooks. She went to a big-box department store and bought a handful of makeup and toiletries that were more appealing than what the hospital had to offer, which naturally lead to a personal weakness in a glistening nearby storefront: clothes. 

Jill excused it by telling herself that she couldn’t leave in hospital gowns and forgotten, oversized items from the clinic’s lost-and-found. What turned into an errand of practicality became something enjoyable and even indulgent, hours browsing the new fashions and color trends of the coming Spring. When she slipped into a pair of knee-high boots the color of cognac, soft around her calves and supportive around her feet, she felt more like herself than she had in some time, stable and strong and capable. She spent more money than her savings account could probably support, but she left feeling like Jill Valentine and not like Jill Valentine the Hospital Patient, which calmed her, made the outing easy to justify as something necessary rather than frivolous.

Dr. Behara stopped in every now and then to talk to her for five minutes and then take flight in a flutter of his lab coat. He postponed her discharge date, first the sixth, then the eighth, now the twentieth, always with some kind of vague, clinical reason — a test that had to be run again, a titer that was still a _touch_ too high for his taste, a vaccine they didn’t have but was to be delivered tomorrow, a tissue sample that hadn’t come back. He was buying time, against and for what, Jill wasn’t sure. That was, until _she_ arrived.

One January day when Jill returned from physical therapy, sheened with sweat and sore all over, the doctor waited by her door, checking his expensive wrist watch. Jill sighed, and made a concerted effort to correct her face before she approached.

“ _Doctor_ ,” she said, “we have to stop meeting like this.”

They _really_ did.

“Miss Valentine, hello,” he said, “how are you?”

“Alright, I suppose. Did you need to speak to me?”

“Yes, yes,” he said, and pushed the door open, gestured for her to enter first.

 _She_ was sitting at the table in Jill’s room, body language crossed and closed off. Every part of her was sharp; her tailored business suit, the short, angled crop of her blonde hair, the precarious height of her heeled shoes. She was unimpressed that she was made to wait, and her face made no secret of it.

Jill looked to Doctor Behara. He said nothing, preoccupied with his ever-present clipboard.

“Alyssa Ashcroft,” the woman said, and stood up. She was tall and thin, pretty in a way that looked expensive and time-consuming, perfectly manicured and plucked and glossy in all the right spots. “Doctor Behara said you’d be expecting me.”

Jill shook her hand and introduced herself. Alyssa’s bright green eyes, even the way she moved — efficient without extra steps, close, in your personal space — gave Jill the strong impression that she was a carnivore of some kind in a past life, and even in this one, she would eat you alive if you let her. 

“You’re shorter than I thought you’d be. No offense. You hear all the stories and you think of a huge, hulking Amazon woman with a shotgun, and…” Alyssa gestured to her, a vague tilt of the hand.

“You get me,” Jill said, and offered up her sweetest smile. “Don’t worry. The mean is still there, just concentrated in less space.”

“Ha. I like it.” 

“Well then, I’ll leave you to it,” Doctor Behara said, and excused himself, leaving them alone.

Jill watched him leave, then turned to Alyssa. “So, are we doing this?”

“Definitely.” Alyssa flicked her hair out of her eye with a practiced movement of her head, pushed the record button on her tape player, and placed it between them. “State your name and your title, please.”

Jill sat across from her. “My name is Jill Valentine. I was a member of the Raccoon City STARS department, Bravo Team.”

“Years of service?”

“1993-1998.”

“Let’s start in June of 1998. Tell me as much as you remember.”

Jill talked, talked until her mouth was dry and her jaw sore and her brain tired. Alyssa pressed her on details that seemed small and insignificant, returned to points that were made hours ago, looked for cracks and inaccuracies. She found many, questioned, prodded, asked, filled in gaps and struck things out where they couldn’t be explained to her satisfaction. She gave Jill breaks to collect herself when the questions were too much, but there was no sympathy in her carriage; it was all in the same of accuracy, of expedience, of correctness. She wrote pads worth of notes while Jill spoke, her thin, groomed brows furrowed by slight degrees. 

Around 4pm, Alyssa looked at Jill, then stopped her tape and closed her legal pad. “I think that’s enough for today. Same place, same time, tomorrow?”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll be here.”

Alyssa stood. Her heels clicked under the wide pantlegs of her business suit.

“You think this’ll help?” Jill asked. “With your case?”

Alyssa smiled, close-lipped and sharp; there was no warmth in it. “More. They’re going to regret the day they ever heard of either of us. Promise you that, Jill.”

She was scary. Not sure of her opinion during the day’s questioning, Jill decided she liked her.

Alyssa wove in and out of Jill’s room without announcement or apology over the week, apparated out of thin air at different times of day with no reason or pattern that Jill could place. On the last day, her long, slim legs crossed, Alyssa’s questions ceased with the heavy “click” of the stop button on her voice recorder.

“I think we’ve got it,” she said, “I think this is a winner.”

Jill blinked at her, surprised at the suddenness of her decision. “How do we know?”

“Let me handle that,” Alyssa said, and gathered her belongings into an expensive-looking leather bag. “You focus on staying available if I need you again.”

Alyssa was quiet, businesslike, offered no pleasantries or small talk. Jill stood, her arms crossed.

“So, I’m gonna ask you a personal question.”

Alyssa didn’t look at her. “Funny way to ask, but go ahead.”

“What do you have against Umbrella? Why do you want to take them out so bad?”

Alyssa straightened then, one hand on her hip, and looked directly into Jill’s eyes. “What an odd question, coming from you.”

“Maybe, but I’m talking about _you_.” Jill said.

Jill thought she saw the faintest glimmer of tension; the slight flare of nostrils or the twitch of a lip, gone as soon as it came. “Some of us don’t like to rehash the weakest points in our lives,” Alyssa said, “I’m one of them.”

“You were there, then,” Jill said, “in Raccoon City.”

“And because I was, I’m going to make sure nobody else is, ever again. Take care, Jill. Watch the news for the next month.”

Once again Alyssa departed, left in an authoritative clack of heels and the shuffle of fine Italian leather. The next time Jill saw her was on television, as promised.

  
***

  
The same night that Alyssa left for the last time, Jill’s pager — the pager that had sat quiet and dark for the last two weeks while the pack of Chris’ duffel bag rested against the wall — shook and rattled against the lacquer of her bedside table, awakened her from a shallow, fitful sleep.

 **Have some time off tonight** , it said, **I’ll be by at 7 or so. Something important to show you.**

Jill took a little extra time to make herself presentable under the threat of company. Because it was Chris, she spent a little extra time on her makeup — time to make things even, sharp, special. 

Chris was a strange case. By his appearances he was strong and intimidating, but he hesitated with a boyish awkwardness when it came to interpersonal matters, in direct relief of Jill’s own sometimes overbearing directness. He had always stood a little too close too her, laughed a little too long at her jokes, even the stupid ones, and people noticed — she was dubbed his “work wife”, whatever that meant, a title they’d rolled their eyes at, dismissed it as the immature jest it was. Neither rose to the bait, and Jill appreciated it; Chris became a place where she could escape to, someone who took her seriously professionally, but also respected her as a person, free of the co-ed messiness that defined the RPD at times. The drama of being an attractive woman in a sea of gun toting Midwestern Good Ol’ Boys seemed to fizzle and die at Chris’ borders. 

Things had turned when he came to her about the woman in the picture on his desk, young and cherubic and model-pretty with thick auburn curls and eyes the color of a cloudless sky, who turned out to be his younger sister. His younger sister who’d developed a habit of partying too much, of dating men Chris didn’t approve of, and he feared, of binge-drinking at college. It was a stark contrast to his otherwise bulletproof tight-lipped professionalism. She gave him advice over lunch, and was pleased that he trusted her with such an intimate topic. She felt special.

One night last year, when the friendly July humidity bordered on August’s oily, gravid heat, after too many nights together, alone, faced with the overwhelming bleakness of their circumstances, their will-they-won’t-they office flirtations had eventually culminated in a night spent together. Then, with a speed that was strange (and maybe even offensive, depending on her mood) he was gone to what was later revealed to be some far-flung part of Europe. A “mission”, he’d said. He hadn’t said goodbye, but rather promised Jill he’d return.

Six months on, Jill wasn’t sure what Chris’ words or visits meant. She knew what she wanted them to mean — and what he’d promised her they’d mean, when he returned — but his comforts and kind words cut with extended silences and endless distractions had begun to confuse her as they had in the past. It had always been his way to give her too much personal space out of respect, so much space that it appeared he’d lost interest. This time was, with growing realization, no different.

About twenty minutes after the promised time, Chris pushed her door open, peeked his head inside to check if she was there. When he noticed her sitting at the window, reading a book, he smiled.

“There you are,” he said, “how are you feeling? Has to be close to go-home time, doesn’t it?”

“Hi,” she said, “where’ve you been? It’s been a while. I was starting to get worried.”

“Work,” Chris said, with a sigh. “There’s a lot to do. You know how it goes.”

“Would definitely prefer that to this,” Jill said, and gestured to the room around her, “right now even field deployments sound nice.”

“Don’t be so quick to want to get back to it, not in this weather. I’ve been pretty sure I was going to lose all my fingers a few times. I brought something for you to look at.”

It was a manila file-folder stuffed with printer paper, reams of information that had been scanned or photocopied in a rush, tilted just slightly on the page. All about Umbrella, its unit movements, its recent sales of bioweapons despite sanctions by NATO abroad. Chris pulled up a chair beside her, and while they pored over the documents, Jill felt normal — normal like she had before everything. She was half-paying attention to the documents themselves and her mind began to wander. She looked up at him and he noticed, gave her an awkward smile.

“What?”

“I was just wondering,” she said, “we should go sit outside somewhere, sometime, and just talk. Catch up. You know?”

Jill expected him to accept this with his trademark pleased confusion. Instead, she received something very different.

“We’re talking now.” He said.

“I mean —” Jill said, “Like we used to. You know? Maybe just catch up, away from all of this. I haven’t heard what Claire is up to.”

Maybe at a playground, somewhere.

Chris considered this. “You know we don’t have time for that.” Careless, it struck her, and something inside her stomach sunk, embarrassed. “I mean — we don’t have the _luxury_ of time to spend on anything but…” he sighed, frustrated, “you know what I mean.”

Jill didn’t know, but didn’t say as much. Then, he said something that pitched the intellectual benefit of the doubt out of the window: “You were there. You know? You should know that.”

Jill blinked, unsure she’d heard him correctly. She looked at his face again, already preoccupied by the documents on the table, her question forgotten — he blinked, rapidly, as if trying to dislodge something from his eyes, squinted them closed.

“Are you okay?” She asked.

“Just a headache,” he said.

Jill sat, in her new outfit and her perfect makeup and her hope, and felt foolish.

Shortly after, Chris stood from his chair, pushed it against the table with a squeak of wooden legs against tile. “You can keep those,” he said, “I’ve gotta hit the road. Are you still set up okay here?”

Jill nodded. “Yep.” Her voice seemed frail and weak even to her own ears. “You know me… I think of everything.”

Chris smiled at her. “Get some rest. I’ll page you, okay?”

 _When?_ “Okay,” Jill said. She didn’t press, and he left her. The door closed behind him with a quiet clap, and she was alone.

Jill struggled to make sense of it. It was possible things had changed and she had been so fixated on what she wanted to happen that she just hadn’t realized it. It occurred to Jill that she was not the only one fixated on something other than what was presented to her. 

She looked at the Umbrella logo on the leaf of paper, printed in gritty grey-and-white facsimile, and it taunted her like a giggling eye.

 _You thought you were done with me,_ it seemed to say, _I can take so much more from you. Just wait. We haven’t even gotten started._

Jill closed the file folder. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (( Everybody loves world-building, right?! I fought with this chapter for a while; there are holes that needed to be filled in terms of motivations and time passage, and zipping around in the timeline without explaining things is a major pet peeve of mine when I'm reading. I tried my best to avoid being infodumpy, but there's not always a way around that, so I apologize. I promise we're getting there, if you're still hanging in. <3 ))


	7. Like Real People Do

January 20, 1999

  
January was full of what the military had called “hurry up and wait”: false-starts, announcements of _maybe possibly sort of_ deploying, then nothing, just a wall-to-wall month of field exercises in the frigid resistance of the snow. Carlos’ unit didn’t end up being deployed that month, but were worked as if a tour were imminent. He had time for little else besides work and sleep, returning home to his apartment with no energy to do anything but shower, eat, and fall asleep on the couch in front of the TVs soft flickering glare, only to roll into the exact same routine the next day.

Near the end of the last day, Carlos was knelt beside Kevin’s prone form, watching him shoot downrange behind the sights of a rifle. Carlos gave the man no end of shit, as they all did, but Kevin had a natural proclivity towards marksmanship; when he knocked off the third mannequin’s head in so many seconds, Carlos wolf-whistled at him, low and impressed. 

“If only you could get that accurate with darts, you might be in business.”

Kevin didn’t look up at him. “Shut the hell up, you Andre the Giant-looking ass motherfucker.” 

Like a ticking clock, sure enough, from downrange: “Hey Ryman, you’re one to fucking talk! You look like the Republican National Convention ate a hair metal band and threw it up all over a Hustler magazine!”

“HEY!” Kevin yelled as Carlos lost his footing and landed with a hard sit in the snow, holding his stomach in laughter. Kevin turned back to him, shoved him. “And you, I told you to shut the fuck up! Why do you always start this shit?!”

“Would you all just _stop_?!” Kennedy demanded from where he shivered behind a thick coat and scarf. “I’m younger than all of you and I swear _I’m_ tired of your stupid schoolyard bullshi—” From somewhere beside him, unseen, a snowball sailed through the air and nailed him on the side of the head, exploding in a starburst of white powder. “OW! What the fuck?!”

“Okay okay,” said one of the other men, “Let’s just get back inside before we kill each other.”

Carlos headed up the back, wiping stray tears from his eyes. Kevin turned and looked at him, as if in warning. Carlos held up his hands, still breathless with laughter.

“I’m Switzerland, man. I got no part in this.”

“Yeah,” Kevin said, and pretended to clinch with him, punch him in the stomach, “sure you fuckin’ don’t.”

Carlos sat down at his work station, a small sliver of the single table where he’d permanently posted up his magnifying glass arm and soldering tools. He slipped on a pair of wide, clear goggles, and began to work, when his phone rumbled against his leg. He rooted around in his pocket, retrieved it to check the message on the small, glowing rectangle on its face. He hit the “accept call” button, tucking the phone between the side of his face and one of his large shoulders, and stood from the table, pushing the goggles back into the dark riot of his hair.

“Hello?”

_“Hey! It’s me.” Jill. “Is… this a good time?”_

Her voice was as welcome a feeling as anything ever had been. “Hey, Jill! Yeah, it’s okay. What’s up?”

Carlos was aware of both eyes and ears on him as he wandered away for quiet to take the call.

_“Hey, they’re discharging me here today — finally get to go home.”_

“Hey, that’s great news. How you feeling?”

_“A lot better, honestly. They said everything checked out, so, away I go. Are you busy tonight?”_

Carlos was — it was Friday, and Friday meant beer and dive bars and darts and relentless dunking on each other under clouds of cigarette smoke in the name of camaraderie and “team building”. But as soon as she said it, he wasn’t anymore.

“Nothin’ I can’t rain check. What you have in mind?”

_“Okay. Well — you feel like dinner? Maybe?”_

If Jill was there, she would have seen him bite his lips together and pump one fist at his side, in victory. Carlos kept himself silent until his voice was even. “That sounds good to me. What time you thinkin’?” 

_“Call it 8?”_

“8’s perfect. I’ll pick you up. I got a place in mind.”

_“Okay! I’m excited. I’ll see you at 8.”_

“Me too. See you then.” He hung up, holding the phone in one hand, and then a peal of wolf-whistles and _ow-ow-OWs_ sounded from the table. 

Carlos took his seat again, replaced his goggles. “Shut up, fuckers.”

“Jill, huh?” Kevin said, and Carlos thought his expression looked sly. “She sounds hot. You got pictures?”

“Yeah, well…” Carlos said, “hey, mind your business.”

“Dipping on guy’s night? She _must_ be hot.”

“Or he’s just desperate.” Kennedy chimed in.

Carlos tilted his head as if he was trying to decide between the two possibilities. “ _Desperate_ ’s kind of a harsh word… I prefer ‘focused’.”

“This is twice. You better come back with a good story,” Kevin warned, “or you’re never gonna live this down.”

***

  
Carlos left his apartment at 7:00 and made the trek through the crawl of Friday-night traffic, thankful for the buffer of time. The sky was pink and orange in a picturesque winter’s sunset when he’d set out — now it was black, hard and cold. No more than three wrecks had elongated the route, snarling traffic back into an endless line of glowing headlights and honking horns. 

Carlos parked nearby in a spot that didn’t have any signs or fire hydrants or things that would get him towed that he could see, and then approached a squat set of granite steps, flanked on either side by a low stone banister. He checked his texts one more time to verify the number, screwed over the doorway in plastic numbers that were painted gold. This was the place. He helped himself inside, out of the cold, and blew on his hands while he looked for her apartment number on a list of names printed in an irregular white typeface against black plastic. He didn’t see a “Valentine” or a “J. —” anything. She’d just moved in today, so hers didn’t have a name, not yet. 

He pressed the white button beside the single nameless number with his thumb. Somewhere inside, a bell rang, strident.

“Hello?” Came her voice, over the speaker.

“Hey, my name’s Carlos. You got a minute to talk about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

Silence. It was like he could _hear_ her eyes rolling. “I’ll be right down.”

Carlos waited and looked around the small room between the outside door and one that blocked the complex’s main hallway; this door was glass, lined around its periphery with solid wood, locked from the inside. When he sensed movement out of the corner of his eye, he glanced over, and was summarily distracted; she was descending the steps, in a black skirt that hit her legs at mid-thigh, knee-high riding boots, and a thin sweater, her jacket slung over her arm. This was the first time he’d seen her in a skirt, and he made a concerted effort to not let his eyes linger over long on her legs, though his success in this was probably a matter of opinion. 

One thing was not opinion, though — one way or another, he was fucking doomed.

“Hey. Hope you’re hungry.” He said, as she pushed the door open, “I got reservations at this place that’s supposed to be awesome.”

“Reservations,” Jill said, a lilt in her voice, as if she were impressed by his forethought. “Fancy. Good thing, ‘cause I’m _starving_. Don’t judge me if I’m a total pig.”

Carlos made a dismissive noise. “You kiddin’? You’ll be in good company, promise.” It was an awkward pivot, partially to fill the silence with _something_ , partially fueled by honesty that refused to be left unspoken. “You look real nice, by the way.”

“Thank you,” she said, and he thought he saw a tiny glimmer of bashfulness. No workboots, a skirt, makeup — so this really _was_ a date, or at least looked like one to him. “It feels nice to have something to get prettied up for again.” 

“Like you’re ever not?” It was a feeler, a test-the-waterer, a line thrown out to decipher just how forward he could be.

Jill didn’t roll her eyes, didn’t push him by his shoulder. She just smiled. 

“Listen to you,” she said. He thought he saw a touch of color in her cheeks — maybe a trick of the light.

At least it wasn’t a refusal. Progress.

It was a short distance to the restaurant, and Jill suggested they walk, citing that parking would be hard to find in a downtown district on a Friday night, which was true. She was the one in the skirt, Carlos figured — she knew her cold tolerance better than he did. So they walked together, her boot soles made delicate taps against the concrete beside his heavy thumps. In a gradual, uncomfortable creep, Carlos couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, like something had run its finger down his spine and leapt out of frame just in time to not be seen.

“You okay?” Jill asked, and her eyes — somewhere between blue and silver, a color he could never place — looked concerned.

“I’m good.” Carlos said. “Sorry, I just keep thinkin’ I hear someone I recognize.”

***

  
The restaurant was warm, lit a cozy shade of deep orange, like firelight. The wafting scents of cooked rice and sizzling chicken, overlaid with something sweet provoked Jill’s stomach into an empty and unhappy grumble. 

One of the waitresses intercepted them over the soft hum of chatter and clinking utensils. She showed them to their reservation, a black lacquered table polished to a shine that was almost reflective, behind a set of short crimson curtains accented with gold. Jill took it in, hands clasped in front of her chest, and slipped into the seat.

“I’m _so_ excited for this,” she said, “this place really is fancy. It smells so good in here.”

“Just don’t look at the bill when it comes or you’re gonna think I had a stroke when I picked it.”

“Thank you again. This is really nice.”

Carlos smiled, unbuttoned his heavy wool coat before sitting down; he was likely too broad to do so comfortably while parked behind the table. He tossed the coat down onto the bench with a thump. “Glad you like it. So, I got an idea.” 

Jill looked up at him from where she was shrugging off her own jacket. He took a seat opposite her and leaned his forearms on the table; he was wearing dark jeans and a white dress shirt that looked remarkably undressy on him, opened at the throat buttons and rolled up to his elbows. The coarse, dark hair on his forearms was carved through with a series of shallow scars, scars she thought she knew the origin of. 

“You and me, we know a lot about each other but... don’t, really?”

“What do you mean?” She asked with a laugh. “Of course I know you.”

“Yeah. But — we don’t _know_ know each other. You know?”

Jill could _sort of_ understand what he was trying to say; when she had to think about it, she both knew him intimately and didn’t know him at all topically — she’d learned that he could both operate a crane and fly a helicopter before she’d learned his last name or where he was from. She knew almost nothing about _him_ as a person — or he, her. 

But wasn’t that stuff something? Wasn’t that _more_ than something? People fought to know each other as they already did, and many people, even married couples, never got there. It was an honor, a privilege, one shared with squad-mates and siblings in arms. But she was willing to try, at least to make conversation. To make him happy, maybe.

“Okay,” she said, and settled on the dumbest question she could think of, with a teasing expression. “What’s your zodiac sign?”

“Sagittar… are you makin’ fun of me?” 

“I’m an Aries. I think that makes us mortal enemies. Blood type?”

“What, you need some?”

The waitress interrupted then, with a cringing apology, asking for drink orders and appetizer selections. When she retreated, they picked up where they’d left off. 

“Well… okay. If you wanna know, let’s do it. How spicy can these questions be?” Jill asked. “What’s off-limits?”

“Nothin’,” Carlos said, and looked up at her in a mild breed of surprise from where he was reading the menu. Even when he tried to conceal his emotions, his heavy eyebrows tended to make up a majority of his facial expression, and they raised up when he was taken aback. After a moment of thought, he returned his attention to the black leather book in his hands. “Unless you want somethin’ to be.”

“Politics? Religion?”

“Okay, now you’re startin’ to scare me. You’re not gonna try to convert me or anything, are you? ‘Cause I was kiddin’ about the whole Lord and Savior thing.”

Jill settled in. He’d given her enough permission to make this interesting. 

The night blazed by at a brisk clip, minutes and then hours eaten in chunks that seemed surreal in their speed. Their food arrived and sat uneaten, except for Jill’s roll of sushi. Carlos asked to try it because of the golden deep-fried shoot of asparagus peeking out of its center, and they ended up sharing it as a novel bonding experience, unsure if they liked it or not until it was completely gone. 

As promised, no topic was off-limits: even the most impolite questions were answered with simple, direct honesty and good humor. He rarely gave more than a few moments thought to his answers, and they always seemed to err on the side of minding his own business, of giving people the benefit of the doubt, pitching the situation to and fro searching for some kind of a silver lining or a way it could be improved. At first it was frustrating and smacked of ambivalence, or maybe a diversionary tactic, but as the night wore on and his approach didn’t change, it became apparent this was just who he was. It was something she realized with grudging acceptance, which then settled down into a sort of lingering affection. 

Somewhere during their conversation, she hit on the topic that really opened him up — culture. Movies, music, languages, travel. He was an immigrant — a refugee who had fled from South America with his family and now had his American citizenship for many years — and his point of view on cultural institutions she took for granted was engaging and, at times, challenging. He spoke about these things with an excitement and depth she wouldn’t have expected from his answers to her previous questions. Jill leaned her face on her hand and watched him as he talked. At one point he stopped and looked at her, as if she’d interrupted.

“What’s that look for?” He asked, laughing, suddenly self-conscious.

“Look?” Jill said, and straightened up. 

“Yeah — that one.”

Jill shook her head. “Nothing… just listening. Keep going.”

Her pager, now rattling for her attention, lay forgotten in the handbag at her side.

***

  
Some hours into the dinner, they had decided they should probably eat their food. The conversation continued, albeit at a slower pace. Jill caught a quick glimpse of his wrist watch as he reached for his glass of water — 12:12am. She did a double-take, and grabbed his hand, turned his arm over, heavy and warm in her fingers.

“Oh wow,” she said, “we’ve been here _four hours_.”

Carlos finished chewing his food, and when she released him, wiped his hands on a napkin. “You need to get back?”

“It has been kind of a long day. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, don’t be. You’ve been movin’ and stuff. I’ll walk you back.” 

“Oh? You going to protect me?” 

“Hey, it’s a dangerous city. It’s the least I can do.”

When the bill came, he paid as promised, something she was uncomfortable with but didn’t fight. They donned their coats and, leftovers in hand, Carlos opened the door for her again. 

Something in the walk home was not as excited as the trip to the restaurant, but a happy, relaxed sort of lull. The nerves had died down, and the silence was a peaceful one, a recurrence of that warm, companionable feeling that had begun to take over whenever he was around. Jill thought of reaching for his arm, cocked out from where his hands were shoved in his pockets, but thought it a touch too forward.

They approached the staircase in front of her complex, and she turned to him.

“So… this is me.”

Carlos scuffed his shoe on the ground, then looked up at her. “Yeah.” Then, “I had a good time tonight.”

“Me too.” 

There was a moment where neither moved, and he simply looked at her. Then there was a slow, intentional movement, one without hesitation: he put his hand on the side of her face and leaned down, placed a kiss that was somehow both firm and soft against her other cheek. Something in Jill’s expression made him chuckle as he pulled away, a warm sound free of his normal taunting. His fingertips left her face, and he took a few steps backwards.

“Night.” He said, and waved once.

“Goodnight,” Jill said, and he turned, walked away. Jill stood before the stairs, rooted to the ground in indecision. She thought again about being too forward, about interpersonal issues, about many things, all in the span of a single second, and then decided — if she wanted something, well, she would take it, and if returning the attention and care someone gave her was disloyal, she supposed she was just disloyal. She turned, and walked in his direction.

“Carlos!” She called. He didn’t hear her — he was distracted with his phone, which he pulled out of his pocket to check a message. Jill took off in a jog, and as if challenging her to race, beside her a black van tore down the street with a loud squeal of tires. It rolled to a stop in the middle of traffic, and the sedan behind it almost crumpled its hood against the van’s broad chrome bumper. The sedan wheeled out of the way at the last moment, laid on its horn, and was gone. A door slammed and a man in a leather jacket and baggy dress pants circled around the back of the van — tall, rail-thin, with shaggy brown hair and a stooped posture.

“Hey, you Carlos Oliveira?” He called. He mispronounced the last name by a mile, but the intention was clear.

Carlos looked up in the direction of the voice. “Depends. Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” the man said, and reached inside his jacket, “yeah, I think you can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (( I had some extra time today so I got another chapter edited, a gift from me to you. Enjoy <3 ))


	8. A Sense of Symmetry

A flash of chrome gleamed in the light, a color that signaled danger to Jill’s brain, like the red blare of a siren. Even though she didn’t see the exact shape of the revolver at first, she saw his stance. He didn’t aim the like someone who had training. Not the clipped, sharp expedience of the military or the police. One hand, no brace for recoil, no moment to draw a bead and fire at a weak spot that was sure to kill. Jill knew a civilian — and panic — when she saw it. 

He fired six shots in Carlos’ direction — the entire cylinder’s worth of ammunition — with a series of deafening cracks that reflected down the street. A chorus of screams rang out, the footsteps of people running from the echoes of the reports pattering away. An explosion of red so dark it was almost black flung out of the back of Carlos’ jacket in a ropey strings that curled on themselves and fell to the snow below. Carlos clutched himself — his chest, it looked like. 

Jill stooped over and ran to him, ran faster than she might have thought she could, and grabbed him around his abdomen, dragged him with her to the cover of a car parked on the side of the road. 

“Where are you hit?” She asked. Carlos fought with the buttons on his jacket, one arm working only with pronounced effort, and looked down; his shirt was still white, with a bright red corona radiating from under his jacket’s left lapel.

“No center mass,” he said, then felt his neck on both sides. “I think I got nicked over here, but it’s not—” Then, as if just now realizing it was Jill, and Jill was supposed to be somewhere in the background, “Wait. Where’d you come from?”

“Stay down. I’ll take care of it.”

“But you can’t, you’ll—”

Jill slid her pistol out from where it rested, solid against her lower back under her sweater, and sidled in a crouch along the car’s shell to where its cabin ended. She turned and aimed her gun over its hood to where the man was struggling to reload the cylinder, far away from any kind of cover. She took a breath, and fired. The man’s hand snapped back and he cried out, one of the bones of his wrist visible through a gaping wound on the underside of his arm. He dropped the revolver, onto the pavement. Jill shot again, through his other hand as he raised it to clutch at the space where the knobby bone of his wrist used to rest; his fingers, now free of their anchoring, floated and bent in odd directions, and he screeched again, fell to the ground. The van’s tires squealed, behind him, spitting snow and ice in a spray. It took off in frantic jags of overcorrection, down the street, left him behind.

Jill returned to Carlos, fell on her knees; the crust of ice and cold concrete bit into her skin, somewhere far away, and she put her gun down. “Just hold on, okay? I’ll call 911, just—”

“No,” Carlos shook his head. “No hospital.”

“What do you mean ‘no hospital’? I saw you take a bullet. You—” 

“It’s just my shoulder — promise,” Carlos grunted, “I got some stuff at home. Help me up.”

Jill grabbed his good hand with her own, leveraged him into a hunkered standing position. Carlos’ eyes were on the man in the street, and he set his mouth in a line, walked toward him, his features blurring into a silhouette against the headlights of the cars that had stopped, at first honking at the obstruction, their drivers now distracted. Jill followed.

“Six shots and no kill, huh?” Carlos said, and scooted the man’s gun away with his foot. It clattered and scraped along the asphalt, landing in a lonely glint somewhere under a nearby car. “Must be like blue balls. That sucks. You got a day job?”

“Fuck you, Beaner,” the man spat.

“That’s real nice of you to offer, but if you fuck like you shoot, you probably don’t make much money at that, either.”

Jill’s ears perked to the sound of a high whine that pierced the distance, and she looked to her left. Whirling sirens flashed their warning coloration into the dark of the morning. 

“We got police incoming,” she said to Carlos, “what do you want to do?”

Before Carlos could respond, the man on the ground looked into the distance with a sudden, harried panic; his breaths quickened, now rough and loud. His face suggested he was doing the speedy mental calculus of a man trapped, which he then turned on the people who stood above him.

“You got a gun,” the man said to Jill, “just put one in my head. _Please_. Just fuckin’ kill me. They’ll send me back if you don’t.”

Jill and Carlos exchanged a brief look.

“Who’ll send you back?” Carlos asked.

“Send you back _where_?” Jill finished.

“Like you don’t fuckin’ know. I’d do it myself if this bitch hadn’t fuckin’ shot my hands off! _Just do it_!”

“It’s Umbrella,” Jill said. “Isn’t it? They put you up to this. How much did they pay you?”

The man stared at her and panted, a sheen of sweat on his blood-flecked face. “You want me to tell you, or you wanna sleep at night?” He licked his lips; the approaching lights painted watercolor splotches against the sweat on his face. “You’re gonna solve a lot of problems for some _very_ desperate people.” 

The police arrived in their gradual, eventual way, blocked the street with cars that were topped with lights that spun and flashed blue and red in spastic flickers. When they arrived it was with guns drawn; both Jill and Carlos put up their hands.

They questioned both in turn, and Jill slipped into her “cop” mode with little effort; she did most of the talking, gave a statement, showed them her conceal-carry permit. They seemed like they could go either way with who they believed, until a nearby witness approached Carlos from one of the cars and asked if he was okay, then corroborated their story. The man on the ground started begging the police to kill him — when they stood him up and handcuffed him near his elbows, he began to sob, repeating that “they” would take him back, that they were sentencing him to death. The police didn’t seem to mind.

While the excitement wound down, one of the police officers, a short woman with blonde hair and a powerful build, noticed the blood dripping from Carlos’ arm onto the pavement. 

“I’ll call you an ambulance sir, just wait here.”

She raised her radio to her mouth, and Carlos interrupted her with an outstretched hand.

“You don’t gotta — was just going there myself. I think I’ll save the money and have her drive me.”

She eyed him. “You sure, sir?”

“Oh yeah. It’ll be fine. Thanks, officer.”

Carlos walked away, a hand against his arm, and then turned to Jill, who was watching him. 

“You comin’?”

Jill stalked in front of Carlos with a great, executive clomp of her boots against the pavement. With her arms crossed, she obstructed his path. “This is stupid. I’m _serious_ ,” she said, and though it was intended as a forceful command, it wouldn’t exit as one; it sounded like more like a plea. “This isn’t funny. Someone just tried to kill you. You can’t _not_ go to the hospital if you’ve been shot. I’m taking you, wheth—”

“Look,” Carlos interrupted her. His eyebrows did the thing again; they furrowed just slightly, gave him an instant sheen of sincerity. “Do you trust me?”

Jill’s mouth was still open from her unfinished word. “O-of course I do.”

“If dipshit back there is tellin’ the truth, then a hospital is the last place you wanna go. We’ve got different experiences when it comes to this stuff — let’s just leave it at that.”

The only thing that made Jill more frustrated with Carlos than when he didn’t take things seriously, was when he took them seriously and proved her wrong in his easy, non-confrontational way. He weaved around her, and touched her on the lower back with his good hand as he passed.

“Sweet to be concerned, though.”

Jill followed after. “If it’s anything that worse than a flesh wound, I’m gonna knock you out and drag you there myself.”

“You’ve got my permission.”

“AND I’m going to make you stay there entire time. The _entire_ time.”

“Hey, if you’re there, no worries about safety. I’ve seen that first hand.”

She wasn’t winning this one. It was a feeling she wasn’t used to.

“Okay.” She puffed. “Give me your keys — I’ll drive. Just tell me where to go.”

***

  
“Here,” Jill said, and grasped Carlos’ jacket by the thick, scratchy lapels. He winced with a loud sucking noise through his teeth when she slid it off of him; the left shoulder of his shirt was completely torn out. A deep, straight wound bubbled dark blood, black in the shadows of the apartment like an oil spill, down the heft of his arm. 

“Where’s the bathroom?” Jill asked him, holding the coat under him so as to not drip blood onto the carpet. When he led her there, she flicked on the light and closed the lid of the toilet with her foot, helped ease him down in case the blood loss made his balance unsteady. She took a seat on the bathtub rim beside him, cold and hard and angular. 

Jill unbuttoned his shirt, white with one sleeve stained red, damp and clinging and warm. When the shirt was peeled away, he was left in a tank top, ribbed in tiny recessed vertical stripes, his dark chest hair visible over the deep scoop of the shirt’s neckline. 

The man had gotten spectacularly close to hitting multiple weak spots; a black char mark seared across the side of Carlos’ throat in a crusted charcoal streak, just over a big, pumping artery beneath the skin. The wound on his left shoulder hit only flesh, but surprisingly deep, a quarter-inch trough with torn edges dug though beefy red muscle, drops trailing to fall dark and wet from the point of his elbow onto the tile floor below. Jill cleaned the wounds as best she could with a nearby bar of bright green soap. It always shocked her just how much flesh wounds could bleed, tunneled deep enough; his blood mixed with the water and the lather colored her hands a milky pink while she worked, down to her wrists. Once it was clean, clean as it would probably get with the supplies she had, she pressed a towel against his shoulder. 

“You probably need stitches,” she said. “You got lucky.” 

“Got some spray left under the sink, I think.”

“Okay…” she said, “hang on, I’ll get it. Hold this.” Carlos clutched at the towel his with his other hand.

Jill dug under the sink in a cabinet that smelled like sawdust, moving bottles of cleaning solution and rolls of spare toilet paper until she found it: a green aerosol can, standing dusty and forgotten behind a jug of bleach. Jill picked up it, turned it over, and read its expiration date — a few months from now. She shook the can and something rattled like the errant bead in a can of spray paint, clacking against the aluminum from the inside.

“You need something to bite down on?”

“I’m a pro,” he croaked. “Just hit me with it.”

Jill held his bicep still, and, with a wince, pulled the wound open just a touch, aimed the nozzle of the can towards it, and sprayed; an acerbic green smell, like burnt rosemary or maybe peppermint leaves behind the sting of alcohol misted into the air. Carlos yelped and grit his teeth, let out a string of artless curses, clenched a fist so tight it was shaking against the white ceramic of the countertop. 

“Sorry,” Jill said. It foamed and sizzled, spitting little flecks into the air in a riot of white froth, then ran thin and grey like dishwater down the lines and curves of his arm. Jill wiped the residue with the towel; the wound was already starting to burn back together, recessed with a raw pink chemical scar that bubbled and fizzed. It wouldn’t be pretty, but at least it’d be closed. She had to give it a few more doses for it to close completely. 

“How’s it feel?” Jill said, quietly.

Carlos flexed his shoulder, as if working out a muscle cramp. His range of motion returned in fits, and as the sting died, his winces faded and his expression became more relaxed. He felt the scar with the tips of his long fingers, checking their pads for blood.

“Thanks, doctor,” he said, “much better.”

“Do you have any Safespirin?” Jill asked from where she crouched, used the clean end of the towel to wipe his arm the best she could. “Might help.”

“Yeah, I’ve got some painkillers. C’mon.” 

Jill tossed the towel into his bathtub, washed her hands, and followed him to the large front room that served as both kitchen and sitting room. He clicked on the overhead light, dim and close, and Jill got a look at the interior — medium-sized and left dark, not fully moved into yet despite being occupied for months. Cardboard boxes labeled for different rooms were still stacked in twos and threes, gleaming posters in frames leaned against walls, forgotten, a task for another day that hadn’t yet come. The space was clean in a way that suggested absence more than fastidiousness, like a renovation model. 

Carlos walked to his refrigerator, opened the door, and bent down to look inside. Jill looked into that black slash mark against his throat, and it looked into her, as well — though the drama of vital, dark blood and open wounds had absorbed most of the attention, that one mark, forgotten against the tan of his skin, signaled a sudden realization. He’d escaped death, sudden and absolute, by mere millimeters. Maybe not even that. It was pure luck, not skill, that prevented it; there was nothing that could have been done if that was what life decided was going to happen. 

Maybe not tonight. But tomorrow…? The next day? The day after that?

A wave of nausea, an unsteady betraying pitch of the stomach, turned Jill’s insides with sudden force. Jill gestured to the balcony, only slightly larger than the exit door itself. 

“I’m gonna get some fresh air,” she said in a throaty rush, clogged with saliva, “the smell of that stuff always did a number on me.”

“Okay,” he said, and something in his face looked concerned. “I’ll meet you out there in a sec.”

Jill slid the door open and stepped into the night air, leaned over the railing. The balcony, a series of black metal slats that doubled as a fire escape joined to the apartments below his by a set of rickety stairs, was built onto the back of the complex. A broad grey stretch of highway, lifted off the street in the beginnings of a mid-city on-ramp then away into the horizon, was busy with headlights and the rush of vehicles under forest green signs directing drivers to one historical district or another. Beyond, there were lights, twinkling white and pale yellow against the dark, a city that still churned and sparkled despite the early hour. 

The wind that toyed with her hair and pulled at the hems of her shirt wasn’t particularly cold for a January, but it clung to the mist of warm sweat on the back of her neck and her chest, turning it into frigid sheets against her skin. She overlooked the yellow pinpricks of light with eyes unseeing, and caught her breath. Once she was sure the urge to vomit had passed, she leaned her forehead on her arms.

Carlos returned with a shuffle of the door on its runners, a bottle of alcohol in hand, its fluted glass frosted from the cold. He poured himself a shot into a small glass. Jill could smell it, strong and piercing, from where she stood.

“I didn’t mean mercenary medicine, I meant medicine-medicine.”

“Hey. _Contractor_ is the polite term,” Carlos chided, indicated the bottle with a shake. “You want some?”

“Dunno — can you hold back my hair with that bum shoulder?”

Carlos tossed the drink back with a swift, practiced gulp. He made a terrible face against the taste. “Oh God. You have to try this.” He poured her a shot in the same glass, passed it over. “Here.”  
  
Jill picked it up between the pads of her middle finger and her thumb. The alcohol tipped and shook in its glass, quivered under the fine shakes and tremors her hand. Jill swirled it around in the glass, then dumped it back. It tasted like _shit_ : hard and acrid and burning all the way down, no sugary training wheels to coat it. It pooled in her belly, warm and hard, and started to spread its fuzzy tendrils almost the instant it was swallowed.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah…” then, “can I have another?”

“You sure?”

“About the drink? Yeah.” She passed the glass back.

“No,” he said as he poured, “I meant about bein’ okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“You know,” Carlos said, and Jill took the shot from his fingers. He placed the bottle down on a small wooden crate, one that looked like it normally doubled as a seat. “My detector isn’t as good as a cop’s. Probably. But I like to think I know bullshit when I hear it.”

Jill tossed the second shot back, placed the glass down, wiped her mouth and looked up at him. “That so?”

“Mhm. Sudden distance,” he gestured to the balcony, “two shots of Don Julio back-to-back, _and_ …” by way of explanation, he lifted one of her hands from the balcony railing; her fingers trembled, even though she tried to still them, tiny flecks of his blood still wedged between her pale fingernails and their beds. “So’re you gonna tell me what’s going on in there, or do I gotta keep feeding you tequila till you spill your life story all over my bathroom? One way or another, it’s comin’ out.”

“Adrenaline dump,” Jill said, flexed her fingers. He released her hand. “Thought he plugged something more important than your shoulder. I guess my fight or flight just hasn’t caught up yet.”

Carlos’ face didn’t shift or change; he turned to the railing, and leaned his forearms against it, looking away across the highway and into the city. The dim ambient light cast a pale corona against his profile, against the deep, burnished shine of his hair, which seemed to settle on only one direction, which was disobedience.

“Y’know… caring about someone else isn’t such a bad thing that you gotta hide it.” He looked at her, then. “You’re not by yourself anymore. You know that, right?”

It made Jill uncomfortable, like someone had looked into her brain with an x-ray, pulled out spools of the grey matter and examined her fears with a jeweler’s loupe. “Old habits die hard, I guess.” She fought to keep her tone even.

Carlos considered this, then shrugged with one shoulder, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“I’ll help you kill ‘em, then.”

Jill paused. She decided it was another of his japes, ill-matched with the circumstances, now more than most times. Those jokes that lifted the edges of her attempts to focus, made it impossible to keep her mind trained on the task at hand, no matter how serious it was. She hadn’t resented the intentional poor timing of one of those jokes in a long time, but tonight was different.

“You like to joke,” she said, “And maybe it’s funny for you, but you… you’re confusing me.” 

Carlos seemed taken aback by the tone in her voice, and turned so he could face her. “I’m not jokin’.” 

“You shouldn’t say things like that unless you mean them,” Jill said, as if she didn’t hear him, “because I think you mean something different than you probably do. I need you to be serious, just this once. Please.”

When the words left her mouth, he was already moving towards her. That same intention from that moment in front of the stairs, unafraid, no hesitation — this time, soft and almost chaste, he stooped down and kissed her on the lips. There was no hunger in that first kiss, no desperation, no push for more, only a reverent and unexpected sweetness that lingered until he pulled away. He leaned his forehead on hers, and watched her from that close vantage; his eyes flickered over her face, as if trying to commit it to memory. 

“Serious enough for you,” he said, “or you need more convincing?”

His body language was shocked when she leaned forward into him and rocked him back, the sound of his step to steady himself ringing against the metal underfoot. After a brief moment to re-calibrate, his hands were against her waist and he pulled her to the line of his body, warm amid the January morning. Under his power that first kiss was something sweet, maybe even innocent — Jill’s was something different, full and deep, her fingers laced in his hair, bodies pressed together. They stayed there on that balcony, cocooned together. Time seemed to stretch, all at once immediate and close, and also distant, expanding. One of his hands, out of what may have been habit, drifted up the flat of her ribcage and brushed against the fabric of her sweater, over one of her breasts. Jill shivered against her own nerves and the bluster of a passing winter breeze, and Carlos pulled away from her, gave her a look that struck her as serious before he remembered to smile.

“Gotta admit, this is the first time I’ve had to take a literal bullet to get to first base. _Totally_ worth it.”

Jill laughed, and wiped a faded smear of her lipstick off of his mouth with the pad of her thumb. “Do you ever get sick of ruining things?”

Carlos pretended to think about this. “Nope,” he said, and led her back inside, away from the cold and the impersonal flutter of headlights. He lifted one of her hands to his mouth, kissed her knuckles.

“You need me to take you home?” He asked. “You said its been a long day.”

The question was coached in innocent concern, but Jill knew what it was asking.

“I figured I…” Jill said, “could just… stay here? It’s cold, and…” it was her turn to lead him by his hands, tugging him back into the shadows of the hallway. “I was promised some more convincing.”

“Alright, I—” he said, and followed with the look of a man in a dream, lost for words for perhaps the first time in his life, “—okay.”

It was brief and feverish, and like most things looked forward to, over before Jill realized it. She would be sore, tomorrow; even after he’d knelt before her, made sure with thorough care and enthusiasm that she was satisfied first, she needed a little extra easing into it. He didn’t seem to know where he wanted to touch her, his hands roaming from one place to the next, but always seemed to return to clutching her against him, keeping her close. Jill was used to these sort of situations devolving into frantic animal desperation after long periods of build-up, and while sparks of intensity found their place there under those rolling gray shadows and twisted bedsheets, it was drowned out by another force, something like solace, nervous but unquestioned. 

They finished with her leaned over him, her face nuzzled against his neck, his arms wrapped around her amid the languid humidity of their sweat. Jill moved to raise herself off of him, and found herself stuck, trapped in his arms. 

“Hey,” she said, and poked his side, “locks are still engaged.”

“I know,” he said, between ragged breaths, and laid his face alongside hers. “Just… gimme a minute.”

Jill relented, rested against him in contented silence while he ran his fingertips along her bare shoulder. After a long few moments of this closeness, Jill poked him again, sudden. He jerked away from her finger, laughing.

“Now _you’re_ the moment ruiner,” he said, and let her go. “Congrats.”

“Please,” Jill said, “I’ll have to do a lot more to take _that_ crown from you.”

Somewhere along the line, Carlos went silent during one meandering conversation or another. His fingers, still stroking her shoulder in lazy circles, faded to stillness; a quiet, musical snore stopped Jill’s sentence, and she turned her head, nuzzled her face under his chin. When she eventually slept, there were no nightmares, no blood or ripping flesh under blunt teeth. When she slept she dreamt of the peaceful respite of nothing at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (( FINALLY. GET A ROOM, KIDS. ))


	9. The Odds

When Carlos awoke, he had been dreaming of hornets, or maybe bees. They buzzed around his head in a droning cloud, distracted him while he tried to do something important. That important dream-thing was forgotten as soon as Carlos opened his eyes, its pressing urgency dissipated under his squints against the deep lavender of early sunlight. He swallowed, his throat dry and his mouth gummy with sour spit.

The buzzing didn’t stop when the dream did. Somewhere in the corners of the small white room, with the door closed and the blinds drawn, far enough away that he couldn’t reach without getting up, the rattling buzz of an electronic device continued its song clear into the silence of morning. Carlos thought about getting up to turn it off, to see exactly what the blue hell someone wanted at the crack of dawn on a Saturday — but that would require careful extraction from his current predicament, first.

He was entangled, cuddled against a woman from behind, laid against the dips and swells of a naked body, warm and soft. One of his hands rested flat against the slender curve of her waist, his other arm wrapped under her shoulder and neck like a pillow. Carlos paused for thought, coiled against the faint shampoo scent of her hair, and laid his head back down. He closed his eyes, content to let the thing run its course without his intervention while he tried to recall how he’d gotten here through the blur of fatigue. They could leave a message if it was so important; they should know he’d be unavailable around this time, anyway.

He struggled to remember and it came back in disjointed snippets and swatches, their edges torn and their timing shuffled around. He’d gone to dinner with… Jill. Right, that was right. Sushi and Japanese food and a huge hole in his wallet. Okay. And then…

Carlos’ memory normally served him correctly, but for something like this, some strange pull demanded he be sure, that he verify with his own eyes. Carlos craned his head over the woman’s shoulder, hesitant, and brushed her warm brown hair away from her face with tentative strokes of his fingers, careful not to wake her, tucked it behind her ear. He’d know that face anywhere, just from the proud, clean way her structure was arranged; the jut of her jaw, the heavy eyelashes over the soft, wide angles of her cheekbones. A strange swoop of elation so strong it dipped precariously close to panic, the same moth-flutter of the heart against ribs, sped his breath as he searched the room, recollected, tried to rebuild the scene from under the heavy bows of blood loss and bitter tequila. The two had swirled, dovetailed hard and nipped at the edges of his propriety, blurring the boundaries between cleverness and imposition; truly, without both he might not said the things that were said, might never have advanced on her, and…

 _Did he_? Was he the one who pushed for this?

Huh.

With a hesitance that felt like a sibling to regret, Carlos picked his way out from underneath her, cradled her head so it wouldn’t drop and wake her up, dragged a pillow underneath and eased her down to rest. He moved off of the bed with slow intent, silent. As careful as he was, she woke up twice, but not completely either time, mumbling and ducking her head down, away from the light. 

Carlos rounded the bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with his thumb. Their coats, which Jill must have thrown onto the bed in her haste to return to him and tend to his wounds, had tumbled to the floor in an intimately tangled pile of puffed nylon and wool. Carlos rooted through his pockets, came up with only the leather of his wallet, worn soft and smooth with age and use, then thought maybe his phone was still in his jeans. He finally found it, small and cold and still, tucked away in the deep safety of one of Jill’s pockets amid the silvery clutter of cosmetics — she must have picked up the phone while he wasn’t looking. If Umbrella had such a hard-on for him, they probably would have come back for anything identifying they could find. Smart. He certainly hadn’t thought of it.

So if _his_ phone was still, what was that buzzing? Carlos looked under the bed (there his pants were — what the fuck?). Then, the sound triangulated, reflected at him in just such a way that when he sat up, he looked up straight at it… a pager, glowing and shaking for his attention, trapped in the angle between the floor and the wall. Must have been Jill’s. Carlos picked it up. Out of habit, he glanced at the screen — he caught the words **where are** — then realized whatever messages were contained in this tiny little bobbling annoyance were firmly in the realm of None of His Fucking Business. He looked away, curled fingers calloused and scarred around the device, and approached where Jill slept, knelt to the side of the bed, beside her.

“Hey,” he said, quietly, and touched her shoulder, soft and smooth and round with slender muscle. She made a little happy noise and smiled, but didn’t wake. He gave her a gentle shake. “Jill. Hey.”

Jill’s eyes blinked open, then looked at him. 

“Hey, your—” he started, and her eyes fluttered down, drifted closed again. Carlos considered his options, then simply left the pager on the table at her bedside. 

In a fog of lightheaded disbelief, Carlos pulled clean clothes from the white plastic laundry basket in his closet, selecting an outfit with all the care of a roulette wheel. Kevin said he’d wanted a good story, and, well, Carlos had the fuckin’ mack daddy king supreme of all good stories to tell, now to just hone it down to something audience-appropriate and respectful, while still being entertaining. Which would cut out all the good bits, but, those were Carlos’ to keep. Kevin would just have to deal.

***

Carlos let Jill sleep while he busied himself with his morning routine. He went for a 5-mile run in a nearby park along a dirt trail under bowing pines and oaks, pounding the buckled soil under heavy feet and the loud blare of his headphones. It occurred to him this might have been unwise, considering the last night’s events, but Carlos was a man married, helpless, to a militant sense of freedom that overrode all else; if they wanted to come get him, they’d come get him. A run seemed small, but small things lead to big things, and he wouldn’t let something nebulous like a threat of what could happen turn his life into something he didn’t recognize. So, he carried on, as he always had.

Drenched in cold January sweat, Carlos returned. He moved with polite silence through the cold stillness of the apartment, shut himself inside the blue-tiled bathroom, and turned on the shower’s spigot as hot as it would possibly go. When his shirt was half over his face, peeling off of his wet skin with the reluctance of a child refusing to release a parent, Carlos’ phone jumped to life, banging and ringing against the white sink counter top. It made him jump, and he cursed, annoyed, while he checked the number on the display. 

Kevin.

Carlos debated not answering. It was Saturday — 8:01am on a Saturday morning, to be exact — and they didn’t work weekends. Not yet, anyway. However, it was Kevin, and Kevin got up to all manner of unsavory things on the weekend that made good stories on Monday, but staring down Saturday morning’s clear focus, he often needed to be rescued from. Carlos screwed his mouth to the side, then erred on the side of being a good teammate, and maybe friend, and hit the “accept call” button.

“This better be good, numbnuts.” Carlos said, leaning his head to the side to pin the phone between the mountainous pack of his shoulder and his ear while he untied one of his running shoes.

“Hey, Heavy,” Carlos’ nickname — at first a one-word description of his job, adopted by men who cared so little for him they’d assumed they wouldn’t need to learn his name because they’d never use it while addressing him — but as their relationships improved in grudging inches, it stuck, as a term of endearment, “better than good. We’re deployin’, Captain just put out the call.”

Carlos froze. “Deploying? Deploying where?”

“Europe. Scotland, he said. Don’t know anything else about it. They said they’d brief us at 1200.”

Scotland? “Okay. I, uh…” Carlos cracked the bathroom door and leaned to look at the bedroom straight across the hall. The door was still closed. “I’ll be there ASAP. Lemme take care of some stuff first.”

Kevin laughed. “Now correct me if I’m wrong, which I often am, but that sounds like you got a good story for me.”

Carlos blew out his breath in a low whistle. “Man, you got no fuckin’ idea.”

Carlos took a long shower, then had breakfast (last night’s leftovers — for $120 a plate, he was going to eat this shit until it couldn’t be eaten anymore, maybe even after that). He was pouring a pitcher-full of water into the reservoir of a small white coffee maker when the door to his bedroom creaked open a little before 9am. Jill poked her head out, the makeup around her eyes smudged in gray blots and her hair messy, fluffed up away from her head. She smiled at him, and he thought it looked a touch embarrassed. He leaned against the counter, and their silence was one of nervy deference, one that waited for the other to speak first.

“Morning,” he said, “you sleep good?”

Jill nodded. “Yeah. You?”

“Oh yeah.” A small laugh. “Best I’ve slept in a while.”

She looked down, that smile still on her face. “Can I use your shower?”

“’Course. I don’t have any lady stuff, but there’s clean towels in there. You need something to wear?”

“I think so. On account of the… blood.”

“Sorry. Can’t take me anywhere.”

She laughed at that, worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “It’s okay. It was worth it.”

After that she disappeared back into the bedroom, leaving him smiling to himself, rubbing the lower half of his face in thought.

Jill wrapped herself in his bedsheet to make the five-step jaunt and shut herself in the bathroom. Women were always sort of weird about the morning after, at least the first one — it didn’t matter how absolutely naked they’d been the night before, how up close and personal you’d gotten with that nakedness, they always tried to cover themselves and skitter away from you. It was endearing, in an odd way, another one of those unexpected flashes of vulnerability that was at diametric odds with her tough demeanor.

When she’d emerged, her skin pink from scrubbing and her brown hair limp and damp against her face, Carlos was seated on the couch, sipping at a cup of coffee. She was wearing his sweater, and they both laughed at the same time when she held her arms up to illustrate the size difference — the sleeves were at least half a foot too long, and it came almost down to her knees, hanging off of one shoulder.

“Well, what do you think?” 

“Okay, that’s just fuckin’ adorable.”

Jill scoffed with a smile on her face, drew near. “Don’t ever call me adorable ever again.”

“Or you’ll what?”

Jill smoothed the sweater over her backside and sat beside him. She leaned in close, into kissing distance.

“If this is your way of getting me to stop,” he said, “I gotta say, you’re pretty bad at it.” She plucked the coffee from his hands, then sat back, and drank from it.

“Dirty,” he shook his head.

“It’s a part of my charm.” 

Carlos propped one of his arms over the back of the couch, across her shoulders. On a normal day, perhaps this would have been a doorway into some less-than-savory jokes, given the previous night’s events. But today, the laughs died into a silence pregnant with words unspoken, and Carlos let them fall out in an honest tumble.

“We’re bein’ deployed. This afternoon, they said.”

Jill nodded, rolled the cup between her palms. “I heard you on the phone. You never told me what it is you’re doing now.”

“You never asked.”

Jill fixed him with a look that was sharp and playful in even parts: _come on, cut the bullshit._

“Okay, okay. We got a group of guys,” Carlos said, “guys that were there with us, saw what we saw. In the City. Few were cops, few were just regular people. Uncle Sam figures we’re the best way to get some hits in against the Company’s bases abroad, given we survived scrapes with bioweapons and all.”

Jill’s eyes brightened. “They—what? How’d they find you? The FBC?”

Jill’s look of sincerity, just on the cusp of excitement, was at odds with the sudden image in his brain of her, limp and pale and helpless in a hospital bed, hooked up to some behemoth of a machine, crammed with dials and blinking displays. It broke a tiny chip off of the boundary of his heart. _Do you want a guarantee of her safety, or don’t you? Because last I saw, she was in a predicament much worse than yours…_

“I volunteered,” Carlos said, and hoped his voice didn’t betray him. 

Jill searched his face, and then looked away. "Do you know where you're going?"

"Scotland, I think. That's what they said, anyway."

"Europe..." Jill said, and nodded to herself in a thoughtful, trailing way.

Carlos touched her far shoulder. "You okay?"

Jill smiled, opened her mouth to speak, but the words came out in that belated way, like she was choosing them with care so she didn't trip on them. “I might be a little jealous. All this sitting around and doing nothing makes me feel…” she shook her head, “I should be out there, too, doing... something. I just feel useless.”

Jill’s expression became distant, focused on the wall ahead and nothing at all at the same time. Carlos thought he saw a flash of himself in that expression; of needing to grasp anything to keep the helplessness at bay. Of needing to not feel complicit in your circumstances through inaction. He’d seen her in action — focused on a task, she was like a hurtling comet with a tail of flame, smashing through obstacles and enemies alike with a fury and purity he’d been in awe of. He considered for the first time where that fire would go, what it would consume, without a clear target.

“Hey,” he said, “you deserve a rest. You got banged up pretty bad.”

“I don’t have time for a rest. They’re not going to.”

Jill was right, of course, but being right wasn’t important now — she was, her morale and her spirits.

“Let us take the lead for a bit. You did your part, and now you gotta get better. There’ll be some left for you to break a piece off once you’re in fighting shape again.”

Jill wasn’t satisfied by this — he could tell by the way her jaw tensed, the way her eyes lowered. “When will you be back?” 

Carlos didn’t know. With Umbrella, he’d been sent on deployments that were promised to last for months — like their tour in the Congolese rainforests outside Kinshasa, a mission to quell a rebel uprising which neared an Umbrella compound, a tour which had flared in a sudden oil-fire blaze that lasted perhaps four days, and they were on their way home. Then there were deployments like Raccoon City, a quick 2-day payday, in and out, which turned into weeks-long tangles of fuckery and failure. There was truly no way to know.

Carlos turned his hand over, palm to the ceiling, a silent invitation. Jill looked down at it and tentatively put her hand in his, soft and cool. She turned them over, looked at his knuckles, the tough skin scarred from being split and skinned and healed repeatedly. Carlos wasn’t sure how long the tour would take, but he knew that now he had a driving force behind him to end it as quickly as possible: the pull of something to return to, perhaps. It was new and made him nervous in a way he wasn’t sure how to parse, but accepted as good.

“Won’t be long,” he said, “promise.”


	10. On the Hunt

January 22, 1999  
United Kingdom

  
The deployment was a swift, almost cursory thing, sweeping the men from one place to another in a span of hours. It was unlike the military, with its endless jags and reams of paperwork, and closer to his time with The Company — they put a call out with the amount to be made by serving the entire tour, you returned the call hoping a sign-up spot was still available, then you showed up to the deployment hangar with your stuff at the time and date detailed. Both the Federal Bioterror Commission and Umbrella seemed similar in so many ways, in how they treated their teams and how they conducted their business, like twins who wore dissimilar clothing to be told apart but still told the same stories with their body languages and the lilts of their voices: some days Carlos would fumble into the hangar after a long night drinking or watching TV and expect to see Tyrell’s intelligent face reflecting the glow of a computer screen, or hear Murphy’s clucking, goading cackles floating on the dusty air. But then reality set in, like a picture sharpening from a blur, and Carlos remembered where he actually was.

They’d been told by the Captain’s disembodied voice over the radio intelligence had sent reports that, under threat of investigation from the US Government, Umbrella had tried to destroy one of their European compounds: a laboratory-slash-testing ground build deep into the loamy underground between the towns of Glenshee and Blair Atholl, just east of the Grampian Mountains in Scotland. To hide evidence of one stripe of wrongdoing or another, perhaps, knowing Umbrella. No doubt an attempt to conceal the tracks of what had happened in that dug-in place, the only way they knew how — shock and overwhelming violence, their favorite tool in a box full of endless resources. There had been reports nearby of strange attacks by predators of unknown species on both people and livestock alike; shepherd children and their grazing flocks had gone missing, entire families traveling by car to go visiting to the next town over had failed to show and were reported to authorities by worried aunts and uncles. Once an explosion rocked the landscape, sending a cascade of rocks down upon a small fishing settlement on a nearby river, that was all intelligence needed to connect the dots and deploy a team.

They flew in the steely cargo bay of a military plane, all seven of them and their equipment amid tarp-covered boxes and stacks of equipment bound for some destination on their path. They packed in-between the supplies like an afterthought, goslings to be set free in the water before the mother bird was to carry on to her focus elsewhere. The flight was long and though they begun the long trek with bawdy energy and unworried banter, eventually the silence swallowed them, gradual and distracted. When Carlos peered around at their faces, he didn’t see fear — he saw the cousin of anger, a simmering, hardened resentment that seated itself deep in the lines and twitches of frowns, the flutter of Kennedy’s distant stare, so strange and tragic on his young face. 

These weren’t the faces of men wanting to ensure peace and balance, as they’d been promised; these were the faces of men wanting revenge, their fingers itching for a target from which to extract it.

Fine by him. Carlos had a few grievances of his own, and maybe a few of someone else’s, he’d been waiting to air.

They’d banked and dipped and landed somewhere outside a town named Manchester, a small tan compound with a single airstrip flocking its north side like the blade of an ice skate, and then were transfered to a military helicopter by a man in dingy green flight coveralls and a pair of dark sunglasses. By the time they’d taken to the air again, Kevin was rubbing eyes puffy with fatigue and the others were falling asleep, arms crossed and heads bowed, against the heft of thick kevlar vests. Carlos should probably have slept as well, but no matter how long he closed his eyes, sleep came thin and shallow like groundwater, never sending him under for more than a few moments at a time. He watched the countryside amble by under the chugging blades, revolving shades of rocky grey and brown and stunning emerald green in patches, fingers of mist and cold moisture clinging to the landscape in a foggy caress.

“Should be around here,” the pilot yelled after hours of silence, jogging a few of them back to wakefulness with startled blinks and groans, “these are the coordinates. We’ll be on the ground in 15.”

Below them, coming into focus in lazy semicircles, was a small village. To Carlos it looked like something out of a post card or a children's storybook, narrow paved streets lined with clusters of small single-level houses painted pale yellow and brown, modest flowerbeds hung in wooden boxes from windows, small vegetable gardens staked with care in the grass, all covered with tarps for the winter. Some space to the right was an empty wooden pen, the kind you’d store cows or horses in. Empty.

“I don’t see anything weird,” Kennedy said, “looks like a normal village to me.”

Kevin squinted against the misty green and then frowned. “Heavy’s the bioweapon guy. What you think, you see anything familiar?”

Carlos was not entirely comfortable with the pressure of being relied upon as a source of knowledge or a leader in any aspect — he preferred to defer to others’ leadership whenever possible, to follow, to go with the flow. Giving orders and directing men wasn’t his style. Too much responsibility for too little payoff. It however occurred to him that in this case, his expertise might be their best chance of success and survival. These men had survived Raccoon City, sure, and most of them had backgrounds that made them tougher than normal civilians — cops and ex-military. But his time with UBCS had taught him one core lesson, and that was surviving wasn’t enough — you had to think like the bioweapons. You had to smoke _them_ out, get on _their_ trail, in _their_ face. You were the predator now, not them, and acting like prey was sure to turn you into it.

Carlos tried to remember Captain Viktor, his lessons, imparted in bits through gravel-shakes of smoker’s cough. Carlos glanced at the countryside, the town, and finally said, leaning over to squint into the distance, "It's here somewhere. Take a minute and you can smell it."

“ _Smell_ it?” Kevin made a face. “I can’t smell shit except dirt and water. What’s it smell like?”

“Exactly — nothin’. No people. Sometimes you can track ‘em more through what’s not there than what is. Look — most of these houses have chimneys. It’s January, its cold. There should be smoke, car exhaust, animals… somethin’. I don’t smell anything except rain and grass. So where are the people?”

Across the aisle, taking mental notes, Kennedy squinted as well, watching the countryside.

“Hiding,” Kennedy said, “Trying to lay low, not attract attention.”

“That’s my guess,” Carlos shrugged, “We’ll know when we get down there.”

“Wait, intel says the BW’s the size of a cat.” Kevin said. “How the fuck’re we gonna find something that small in an entire town?”

It was anyone’s guess. 

The chopper hovered close to the cobblestone road and they jumped out of its open door one at a time, landing in a series of thumping boots and clattering metal. The rain fell hard and icy-cold in sheets that were almost horizontal, riding gusts of howling January wind. They arranged themselves in a formation that was becoming so familiar they tended to walk in it as well when not paying attention; Kennedy and Carlos in the back, Kevin in the center, and the four other men heading up the front and flanking the sides.

Carlos turned with his gun braced against his shoulder, sweeping for some sort of movement, and felt eyes upon him. He looked up. A small child in window to his left waved to him; he held a finger to his lips, suggested she remain silent. She returned the gesture and tiptoed away from the window. The rain had already plastered the riot of his hair down onto his forehead in a long, dark sheet, and he flipped it back, slicked out of his face.

They craned their heads, peeked in the narrow spaces between houses, until Kevin stopped, frozen in place. The driving rain beaded off of his skin, his dark red hair plastered against the side of his face. "Heavy," he said, quietly, and pointed, "Look."

Between the walls of two homes hung a web of mucous, milky white and gleaming wetly in the falling rain. Kevin walked towards it and Carlos grabbed him by the back of his collar, hauled him stumbling back. Carlos kneeled down and pulled a small decorative wooden sign out of the soil. He tossed it underhanded at the web; it hit the material and began to sizzle and blacken, curling in on itself.

“Never touch their blood, their spit, nothin’,” Carlos whispered. “The shit in Raccoon City’s just the tip of the iceberg, man.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kevin breathed.

From behind, Kennedy hustled around them, put his pack down and retrieved a set of vials and a small metal tool that looked like a butter knife. Carefully, he scooped up a hunk of the stuff as it dripped off of the wall, scraped it into the tube, and sealed it shut with a click. He put the tube back in the bag, then retrieved a small device, like a camera, and took a few photos from different angles.

Down the road, ahead by about twenty paces, one of the other men stood still as a statue, his gun readied but stuck somewhere between his side and his target. He opened his mouth and then gestured, silent, for them to join him with a wave of his glove. They moved, quietly, until it came into view.

Claws as long as one of Carlos' arms clutched the corner of a brick house, and the first thing Carlos thought of was Spider-Man, the way he clung to a wall with one hand and suspended himself off of it with his feet. The thing was the size of a large truck, black as night, a gleaming oil slick in the rain. It had no eyes that Carlos could see, but what it lacked in that it made up for in mouth: a massive set of jaws lined with serrated jigsaw teeth dripped blood and saliva in starving, draping ropes. It tore at the carcass of a cow, torn clean in half, with greedy and desperate hunger, ripping out a coil of the cow's entrails. As it moved its head, it spotted them. Its jaws began it quiver and click at them in short, spastic rhythm, like a cat chattering at a bird marked as its prey. It threw the cow’s body crashing to the ground, the corpse’s eyes rolled back in dead stupor.  
  
“What the _fuck_ …” Kennedy whispered under his breath.

“I thought it was the size of a cat?!” Kevin hissed.

“Hey, tigers are cats,” said Carlos, loading the heft of grenade rounds into the barrel of his launcher, already folded open. "Look sharp, we got a dinner guest."

***

  
Somewhere far away, a fight of a different sort was brewing.

Chris paged Jill that morning 12 times, total. With a breed of something that felt like the daughter of worry and annoyance, Jill dropped a quarter into the slot of a pay phone, punched Chris’ number on the silver keypad, and watched over her shoulder for the creep of the black van.

Chris picked up the phone in a great clatter, dropped it, then picked it up again. “Hello?”

“Hey, sorry, I didn’t get your messages until this morning. What’s going on? Are you okay?”

Chris’ sighed. The silence didn’t sound relieved; it was cold, pointed. Then, “Where were you last night? I was out of my mind worried about you. I heard the radio scanner, and they said it was something about Umbrella, and I thought — I thought since you just moved — where were you?”

“I’m fine,” Jill said, “I’m home now. I just went out last night and I fell asleep before I saw your messages.”

His confusion was palpable, like he didn’t believe or accept her excuse. “I went by your apartment. I must have rang it twenty times. You didn’t answer.”

The circular route of this conversation was already tiring. “Yeah, I just said — I went out last night. I just got back.”

“Look — can I come by so we can talk about this? There’s a lot we need to discuss.”

Now he wanted to make time and come over. Of course. Jill felt petty and ashamed of herself as soon as she thought it — it was completely possible that she was misreading the situation — the resentment was hard to move. It kept bubbling up, hot and consuming, around the edges as she tried to push it further down in her chest. 

But this was Chris. He was owed more credit, owed more space and allowances outside of personal squabbles. He’d earned that much; they were friends, linked by something immutable and permanent. He cared about her, and she him. That was all. They needed each other, whatever form it was taking.

“Okay.” Jill said. “I’ll be home.”

“I’ll start over there. I’ll be by in about 30.” 

Chris hung up and Jill was left staring at the receiver.

  
***

  
Jill changed into an outfit that fit her — jeans and a t-shirt. She hung Carlos’ sweater up in her closet. The sweater was dark blue and ringed around the biceps with red and white stripes, the name Giants spelled across the chest in faded lettering that had begun to peel away from repeated washes. It was soft in the way only very old garments were, the stiffness of its stitches worn smooth by the passage of time. It looked well-loved. She would keep it here, safe, until he returned.

When Chris arrived, the first thing he did was hug her.

“I tried to get a hold of you as soon as I heard there was a shooting in the area. When intelligence said that the shooter was connected with Umbrella and that you were involved, I thought of how you just moved and I thought it couldn’t have been a coincidence.” He braced her arms, looked her up and down, his serious face concerned, drawn. “Are you hurt?”

Jill shook her head. “I’m okay. Can’t say the same for the other guy, though.”

Chris smiled at that, his eyes narrowed. “I believe it. Do you think you could remember the guy if you saw him?”

Jill remembered — pale skin, thin and stooped, greasy brown hair. “He was pretty memorable.”

“Good. There are a few Umbrella operatives that have been seen in the area,” he said, “here, see if you can I.D. the guy so we can track him, take him in for questioning.”

Chris retrieved a sheaf of thick, glossy paper from somewhere inside the breast of his jacket, and spread a series of five printouts like playing cards and set them down. They were photos, candid, taken when people weren’t aware — five men. They all looked very different, some with hair, some not, some old and paunchy, some young. Some flitted over Jill’s memory in the way people with average faces do, but there were two she’d recognize anywhere: the man from the van, looking over his shoulder, his beard scrabbly and patchy, his hair unwashed. Then — Carlos, standing at a street corner, his hands tucked in the heavy wool of his jacket. Even with nothing to compare his height to but the lamppost he looked imposing and powerful — if Jill had seen just this photo, with his unimpressed squint and his strong silhouette, she’d think he was one of those professional fighters that fought in octagonal cages for money. 

“Are these your targets?” She asked, her eyes fixed on the photo’s grainy black-and-white print, the blacks where his eyes should have been, shadows cast under his heavy brow. 

Chris looked up at her. “For now. We know they’re connected to Umbrella, and we know they have intelligence that we can use. They’ve all been seen in the area as recently as last week.”

“It’s this one,” Jill said, and pushed the photo of the man with the scraggly brown hair and the thin beard towards Chris. “He wasn’t alone — there was a driver, and they got away.” She paused, then, fingers hovering over Carlos’ photo, and then pushed it to Chris as well. “I know this one. He’s not who you want.”

Chris furrowed his eyebrows. “What do you mean, you know him? Was that the driver?”

Jill took a breath, “He’s my friend. He… helped me get out of Raccoon City.”

The information passed in the air and seemed to wash over Chris, parting like water around a stream stone. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “He’s your what?”

“My friend,” Jill repeated. “He’s a good guy. Carlos. The one we talked about when I woke up. In the hospital. That’s him.” 

“The one you were asking for?” Chris struggled with this, his face tense, and he was silent. That silence was a roiling thing, full of quiet thunder. “You didn’t tell me he works for Umbrella.” 

“He’s not with them anymore,” Jill said. “He saw what they did, and he defected. He helped me—”

“Listen to yourself.” Chris interrupted, and there was a sudden thread of escalation, like the pressure of a barometer falling just before a storm. “Just for _one_ second.”

Jill blinked at him, too shocked to be offended.

“Umbrella is not your friend.” Chris continued. “What have you told him? Does he know where you live?”

Jill shook her head. “This didn’t happen because of him. He wouldn’t do that. He was their target.”

“No, he wasn’t — you were. He works for _Umbrella_ , Jill. They’d do anything to get at us.”

“Work _ed_. Past tense.”

“There _is_ no past tense! They don’t just let you leave, free to walk the streets. They have something on him, or…” Chris paused, “You are the last person I thought I’d have to have this conversation with. You were there in the Arklay Mansion with us. You _know_ what they do. We worked with Wesker for years. _Years._ And neither of us had any idea what he was up to. How is this guy any different?”

Jill shook her head, obstinate. “It’s not the same thing.”

“How isn’t it the same thing? They’ve done this before, Jill. They weasel their way in, make you trust them, and then—”

“I _do_ know what they do, because I was also in Raccoon City. _Alone._ ” The words came fast and sharp in a bubbling eruption, but Jill didn’t regret them. Chris looked hurt, taken aback. “Or rather I would have been alone if not for Carlos. I’m not an idiot. I know the implications. Maybe we should be asking what happened to you, for you to start questioning my judgment like we didn’t go through the exact same thing. I trust him and I guess you’re just going to have to get over that. Maybe if you were there, _you_ would know.”

“So there it is,” Chris said, tone soft. “I make one mistake, and suddenly Umbrella’s got you in their pocket.”

Jill sputtered. “Excuse me?” Any offense over the besmirching of Carlos' character was now gone, with the prospect of her own called into question, brazen and unexpected.

“Suddenly I’m the bad guy for doing what we both agreed was right, and the guy from _Umbrella_ is the hero? He must have really done a number on you. I know you’ve been going through some issues, but this is… this is beyond insane.”

It hung in the air.

“That’s what I am to you, then,” she said, low and warning, “ _insane_.”

A pause. “It’s starting to sound that way, yeah.”

A rage, impotent but chilling in its sudden grip, filled Jill’s body with heat that rolled off her like a stink. She could feel her cheeks burning. 

Jill pointed at the door. “Get out.”

Chris just shook his head. “You’re going to end up dead, Jill.”

Jill’s arm remained extended. “ _Get. Out._ ”

Chris closed his mouth, his expression tight-lipped and angry. He shook his head, slowly, an expression that said without words whatever he was thinking of saying wasn’t worth it. Then he was gone, slamming the door behind him with a bang that shook the windows.

That night, Jill sat on the edge of the navy air mattress that would do for now as a bed, the stiff plastic seam around its circumference nipping into the underside of her thighs. She thought of nothing; under the weight of so many directions being pulled, so many things to worry about, so many different angles to maintain, her brain slipped into a waking sleep. Zoned out. Her eyes drifted to the closet, where the sweater hung, limp under its own weight. She would never tell him, of course — it was a kind of girlish gesture that read so weak to her own mind that she would deny until her dying day, but for want of comfort, Jill slipped the sweater off of its hanger and pulled it on. She felt a sense of security, and though she knew it was a trick of her mind, she was used to her mind playing tricks. She settled down in the warm folds of the fabric, covered herself in a blanket, and slept.


	11. Something to Talk About

Blair Atholl, Scotland  
January 29, 1999

  
Kevin wasn’t a Rhodes scholar by any stretch of the imagination. He’d never claimed to be an intelligent man. Sure, he wasn’t stupid, but he’d always caught onto things a bit slower than most around him. He’d graduated high school with a solid C average, and for lack of other prospects except doing time for the Army in the Sandbox overseas, he’d enrolled in police academy straight after graduation. He’d never thought about college or degrees or anything beyond being a cop working a beat in his hometown, trying to do some good while still sticking close to home. It suited him fine, gave him a steady paycheck and health insurance, and most important, made his family proud. He was a simple guy with simple goals. That satisfied most of them.

But while Kevin wasn’t intellectually gifted or even very curious, he was still a police officer with a police officer’s instincts, the preternatural tendency to connect dots between events with bits of mental string that most people didn’t. And he thought he’d found one of those yarn paths in his brain, bright red and frayed.

The boys sat around a circular wooden table, its varnish long since worn off in pale streaks under years of drinks being placed and lifted from its surface. The pub was small, smaller than most in the States, shadowy and with an air of sadness and fatigue. No jukebox or stereo or anything like the places Kevin tended to haunt, just two older men, one playing what might have been a fiddle or a violin (Kevin didn’t know the difference), the other singing tunes Kevin had never heard in a voice that was higher and clearer than expected. Some kind of open-mic night. This was not a place of partying but a place of reflection, of respite. The drinks were strong and more importantly free, thanks to their “heroism” for what the team had done back in the Highlands a few days past. The locals spared a few strong, strapping young farm boys to help them scout the misty mountains and rocky valleys for more of the bioweapons, of which they found blessedly zero. These people had treated them like family, put the team up in their houses and gave them food and drink and warm places to stay while they were on the hunt, collecting information and evidence. Now that the team was done and had said their goodbyes on their last night, they’d decided to let loose a bit, and mingle. And mingle Kevin intended to.

They joked and insulted each other in the cruel way brothers do between shots of Jameson and pints of dark beer, and while the atmosphere between them was lively and relieved, something seemed out of place. While the guys were laughing and cutting up, flirting with the local girls (Kennedy seemed a particular favorite of the women here with his strong chin and American-blond hair and bright blue eyes), one of them was quiet and subdued, laughing along but not jumping in and throwing tinder on the fire like he normally did.

“Hey,” Kevin said, and nudged Heavy — Carlos, his Christian name was, but Kevin had never used that name past their first day together and it seemed weird to his ears — hard with his elbow. The other man blinked, looking up from his beer with a curious expression in his eyes, the same dark amber color of the bottle in his hand. He wasn’t sulking, per se, but he was somewhere else. His thoughts had drifted, in and out between jokes. “You good?”

“Oh yeah,” Heavy said, his baritone getting lost somewhere under the music, “just thinkin’. Sorry, not tryin’ to be a drag.”

“Now there’s a shock,” Kevin said, flipped a peanut into the air and caught it in his mouth, “thinking about what? Death, taxes?”

Heavy waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. For a man as large as he was, he took up surprisingly little social space; Kevin was used to the big strong mercenary to be the type that strutted around, chest out, like some kind of bird with its tail feathers fanned, looking for a mate. Or maybe someone smaller to peck at. The only space Heavy seemed to occupy were those between the rough edges of other people, grinding their angles down to something more pleasant and easy to be around with kind words and lighthearted jokes. His sudden pitch into silence was strange and unlike him. “Not important. Just ready to get home is all.”

“Hm,” Kevin nodded towards a vacant dart board hung on the wooden wall beyond. “You up for getting embarrassed?”

Heavy laughed, a chuckling sound that bordered on sarcastic. “Sure.”

Kevin ordered them a line of whiskey shots, carried them back to the table behind the board, set them in a line. They both held one up, cheers-ed the glasses together with a clink, then dumped the shots back.

Just then, a girl, pretty in an accidental way with long, black hair approached Heavy from the other side, tapped him on his arm. She spoke to him in a charming, musical lilt.

“Hi,” she said.

Heavy leaned back, crossed his arms, and gave her a smile. “Hi yourself.”

Kevin watched. The girl asked him back to her table for a drink — she’d heard what they’d done, and she thought it was really impressive of him. She’d been watching him tonight and wanted to get to know him better, maybe spend some time together, if he wanted.

“I…” Heavy tilted his head, and his smile turned into something polite, perfunctory. “Look, that’s real nice of you, and I appreciate it, but I got a…” he stopped himself, then said, “I shouldn’t. Sorry.”

Kevin looked at him, askance, as if he’d just turned down a thousand-dollar payday.

The girl nodded, her expression quieted. “Of course. Lucky girl. If you change your mind, I’ll be here a while longer.” Then went back the way she came.

“Okay,” Heavy said, watched her walk away, “thanks.” 

“How the fuck do you do that?” Kevin said, and lobbed a practice dart against the board, which landed somewhere on the outer ring.

“Do what? Vigorously cockblock myself?” 

“They approach _you_. I’ve never seen you mack on a single woman in my life, but I’ve seen the opposite plenty of times.”

Heavy laughed again in a sarcastic, disbelieving way. “You haven’t been around me long, is all. Seems like they’re more interested when you’re not, sometimes. Let ‘em think its their idea.”

Kevin thought about this. “Not happening. I don’t have that kind of self-control.”

Heavy just shook his head, aimed a dart with one eye squeezed shut, and threw. It got closer than Kevin’s, but not exactly a bulls-eye. He made a sort of dismissive noise, and stood back for Kevin to take a shot.

The lead-in was perfect.

“So…” Kevin said, and launched another dart, “You never told me about this girl you’re seeing. What’s she look like?”

Heavy puffed breath through pursed lips. “Man, she’s so fuckin’ beautiful. Hard to describe.”

“Well, try. Paint me a mental image there, Picasso.” _Beautiful_ , not _hot_ or _gorgeous_ or a number of other terms that flagged as desire rather than emotion… _beautiful_ was what he went for first. Kevin thought it strange, after some of the conversations they’d had surrounding these topics.

The other man started to speak and then stopped a few times, as if struggling to put it into words. “She’s a white girl, a brunette,” he said, “short hair, ‘bout down to here. But it works on her, like, frames everything, you know?” Kevin struggled to picture a girl with short hair that he’d prefer over long hair, but didn’t say as much. “She’s got the dark hair, and these eyes that stand out,” he started, “like nothin’ I’ve ever seen. Suck you right in.”

“Hmm,” Kevin said, “body, 1-10?”

Heavy gave him a look, wide-eyed, then just nodded. 

“Damn, like that?”

“Whatever you’re thinking, it’s _exactly_ like that.”

Everything was lining up. Kevin nodded, a mental image starting to confirm to a certain shape, well-worn in his brain. “So what does she do? You know?”

Heavy took a breath in, as if he was considering whether or not to tell. “She was a cop,” he said, “in Raccoon City. Some special team they had, like a riot squad.”

Kevin rubbed the bottom of his face to hide his smile. He’d gotten it in one. “And you said her name was… Jennifer?”

“Jill,” Heavy corrected, tossing back another shot. 

“Ahhh,” Kevin said, “Jill… Valentine, right?”

Heavy looked at him then, his eyebrows furrowed. “I didn’t tell you her last name. Did I?” He said.

Kevin shoved him with playful excitement. “You and Jill fuckin’ Valentine?! You lucky piece of shit,” He said, in a hissed whisper. 

Heavy looked around, as if unsure anyone else was listening. “What, you know her?”

“Oh my God you fuckin’ mook, Raccoon City had like five people in it. Everyone who worked at the damn RPD knows Jill Valentine. _She’s_ who you went out with?”

“Uh… yeah. We got out together. Wait a fuckin’ second, you know Jill?”

“Of course I know fucking Jill Valentine, idiot. And I said _went_ out, not _got_ out. So you guys are… like, _seeing_ seeing each other?”

Heavy paused. “What is this, eighth grade?” Then, “I dunno, man. I think, maybe… kind of?”

“Did you…”

Heavy gave him a look of warning, then, and said nothing more. 

“You _did_.”

“You gotta get that information somewhere else, man.”

“YOU DID. Jesus fucking Christ, are you serious?! You have to tell me about it.”

“Sounds like someone might have a crush, huh?”

“You kidding? There was one point I would have sucked her dad’s dick just to see where she came from.”

Heavy laughed at that, sudden and wheezing, like it had caught his breath somewhere on the way out. “God damnit, the fuck’s wrong with you, man? Ugh.”

“Come on, just gimme the Clif notes.”

“Nope,” Heavy said, with finality that was light, sure, but final all the same. “Not happenin’.”

So talking about sex was out. Kevin took another approach.

“Sounds like you really dig her.”

He softened, then, just a touch, hesitated before he threw his dart. “She’s amazing. Like nobody I’ve ever met before.”

“I didn’t get to know her that good, how so?” That was a lie, but whatever. For _this_ , he needed precious little prompting to spill his guts. 

“She’s so fucking smart, man. Smart, and brave, and… I dunno. She’s got this real sweet side too. You knew her, I don’t gotta tell you.”

 _Smart_ and _brave_ didn’t read to Kevin like attractive qualities in a woman; it was like saying someone could read or could speak English. Okay, so what?

But from the look on the larger man’s face, thoughtful and a touch dreamy, they were for him. There were definitely feelings involved. From his side, at least. That wasn’t new or even novel — Valentine had no end of male admirers, suitors, whatever you wanted to call them. She’d never given any of them the time of day, of course, but male interest in her ranged from casual crushes to dudes considering leaving their wives if she’d agreed to it. She never had: she was too concerned with her job, with being taken seriously, and seemed to resent the male attention, ignored it the best she could. Eventually, perhaps protecting their egos, they had assumed she was a lesbian — because of course, if a woman wasn’t interested in _their_ dick, she had to be — and the attention waned to a dull roar. Then she had joined STARS, and suddenly she was out of reach, cocooned by a protective layer of dangerous, insular people, and was summarily forgotten.

Of course, unless it came to Redfield. Well, Redfield _and_ Vickers. Those were two totally different stories with two totally different outcomes, one unrequited and one... not. Probably. But everybody knew.

Kevin considered warning him. He considered telling him to be cautious. She was a passive heartbreaker, getting close with men without realizing what they wanted from her, and then leaving them wanting, grasping at the air where she stood. If Chris was still around and kicking somewhere, it was completely possible that this was a fool’s errand — maybe Heavy was even her guy on the side and had no idea. Whatever. He didn’t seem to care, so Kevin decided he shouldn’t, either. But he’d been so happy this last month, and now it made sense. Whatever was going on, it was good for him, so it was good for Kevin, too. No need to fuck it up for him.

It was then Kevin realized that Heavy wasn’t just his teammate, he was his friend. He was concerned about him, happy when he was happy, and wanted what was best for him. Heavy noticed some change on his face, and asked, with a smile, “Are you drunk?”

Kevin just laughed. “Shut up, dickhead. Gimme that dart, I’ll show you who’s drunk.”

***

February 1, 1999  
Washington, D.C.

  
When Carlos returned from Europe, so looking forward to some actual American food and not endless piles of sausages and gravy and mashed potatoes and beer, his apartment seemed odd, somehow. Empty. More empty than normal.

He dropped his bag beside the door and kicked off his boots, flopped onto his couch and let out a loud breath. It was Sunday, and they had the rest of the day off. He lifted his hips and cracked his poor, beleaguered spine, kicked one socked foot up onto the arm of the couch. Alone with his thoughts, Carlos simply existed for a few blessed, peaceful moments, one arm draped over his forehead. He considered keeping his phone off for the rest of the weekend, but knew that he couldn’t — work might try to grab him again, Kevin might need bailing out, and…

Then there was Jill.

Carlos didn’t know what kind of thing this was — it was mutating from day to day, changing, and he hadn’t quite gotten the feel for what was appropriate and what was not. This stretched beyond propriety; now that the seal was broken, there were things tumbling out of him that he wasn’t sure how to stuff back inside once he caught them. What Carlos _did_ know is he didn’t want to scare her off or come on too strong. To fuck it up. He didn’t want to be one of those guys that assumed now she belonged to him, or that because they’d slept together that meant something other than sleeping together. Truly, he was the one on the other side of this, normally, able to compartmentalize physical things and emotional things as completely separate entities. So he figured he’d just do what he did, be cool, and let things unfold how they unfolded with no expectations, with the fool’s confidence that he’d be able to do so at all. 

He thought about calling her, then wondered if that’d be too desperate — _hey I just got back from a warzone and the first thing I do is call you haha no I’m totally cool haha so what’s up girl?_ Yeah fucking right. But if he waited too long maybe that’d read as disinterest. Maybe…

Carlos sighed and then cursed at himself. This was completely unlike him. He knew why — his brain was convinced there were some stakes that were higher than normal and it was making him nervous, making him act out of character, shaky and tense. Maybe some kind of PTSD or something. That wasn’t entirely out of the question, now that he thought about it.

Then, he remembered his own words — _You know, caring about someone’s not such a bad thing that you gotta hide it._

Carlos released a breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding.

“Y’know what,” he mumbled to himself, sat up in one great rush, “I’m just gonna do what I think is right, and if she doesn’t like it, then…” 

He dialed Jill’s number, and drummed his fingers on one of his thighs as it rang. On the third buzz, she picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” he said, putting forth his best effort to sound breezy, upbeat, “you said you wanted a call when I got back in town, and we just rolled in a few hours ago. How you been?”

“ _Hey!_ ” Her voice sounded relieved, happy, like he could hear her smiling through the phone. “Hey, it’s good to hear from you! How did it go?”

“Went good,” he said, “really good, the guys are an amazing team. Uh… funny story actually, one of them said he worked with you, at one point.”

“Oh? From the RPD?” Excitement, tensed like a bowstring. “Who is it, what’s his name?”

“Kevin. Kevin… Ryman?”

“Holy _shit_ ,” Jill breathed, “he made it out?”

“Yeah. Was he a huge dumbfuck when you worked with him, too?”

Jill laughed at that, clear and long. “Oh god, the _dumbest_. But he was a really good cop. Great guy, too. Man, that’s such good news. I thought we all…” she trailed off. “Wow.”

Carlos smiled. He picked at a stray, loose thread on the knee of his pants.

The words bounced around, as if restraining them made him physically uncomfortable, and he decided to just let them out and see where the chips fell. “So… can I see you soon? I got a lot to tell you about.”

There was silence, a soft shuffle, and then she said, “I’d like that. We can talk about what you saw. Maybe go and eat something you like, this time.”

Whatever tension had taken hold in Carlos’ chest released, and he let out a breath. “You thinkin’ Friday?”

“Friday’s perfect.”

***

February 4, 1999

  
Carlos and Jill had made plans to meet up on Friday, when their schedules permitted. On Wednesday evening there was a ring on her intercom, and when she asked who it was, silence. Jill eyed it, suspicious. She walked down to the front door and there stood Carlos, alone at the base of the steps, watching the traffic as he waited, the rain beading on his coat in clear little drops, his dark hair shining, plastered against the skin of his face, his neck.

“Hey,” Jill said, surprised, and walked down the steps towards him. A brief clench of panic squeezed her chest. “Did I miss the day we planned? I thought we said Friday, I’m so sorry.”

Carlos messed with his hair, sopping wet, tried to flop it out of his face. “Hey,” he said, then, “We said Friday, but…”

Jill blinked up at him, and waited for him to finish. “But what?” She said, with a confused smile.

“I just wanted to see you,” he said, “I won't take much of your time. Its just been a while, and I was away, and… Friday’s still a few days from now. So… here I am.” He winced, a little. “Is that okay? Sounded better in my head.”

It was a thing that, if anyone else had done it, she might have been annoyed, maybe even put off. But his naked sincerity shellacked over that gap between what he meant and what she perceived, smoothing them to an agreeable shine. Given the fact they’d been separated over the last few weeks, and of all the things he could busy himself with, he made time for her... it wasn't read as an intrusion. It was unexpectedly sweet, considerate, maybe even flattering.

“Of course it’s okay,” Jill said, reached out for his hands. He took them, pulled her into a hug, one arm around her waist, his other hand on the back of her head. She leaned her head on his shoulder. “How do you feel?”

“Better now.”

Jill didn’t respond, but nestled in closer, squeezed tighter. 

Down the street, far enough away he wasn’t visible from where he watched in the driver’s seat of his car, Chris Redfield was doing what was known as _stewing_. He sat by himself, agitating in a toxic sludge of a few different emotions, chief of which was betrayal. Not romantic betrayal; those things seldom occurred to him these days, all the visceral water of his emotions having been wrung out already, overcome with so much tragedy and regret that none was left for dalliances or affairs. But an all-encompassing spiritual betrayal, a wonder at how they could have been so fucking stupid — both of them. She, for what was currently in front of his eyes, and he, for thinking that Jill had an understanding of what needed to be done. Had a clear idea of who was an ally and who was an enemy. That they were cut from the same cloth. Wesker had betrayed them, once, and now here was Jill, courting the same beast, allowing it in, despite having being bitten by it before.

Chris studied the line of the man’s profile, the broad pack of his shoulders, the thickness of his legs, strong like tree trunks even in casual clothing. The size of his hands against her, like bear’s paws. Jill was resourceful and quick and slippery as a minnow, but in close quarters… she’d have no chance against him if — no, when — he decided to wrap those hands around the slender curve of her throat; or even if he decided to love-tap her in the face, or maybe come up behind her and wrap one of those arms around her neck until her brain died from lack of air, her face purple while she hit at him with progressively flagging strength. It would be over. Every time they were alone, she was at risk. One of the last STARS, like a fluffy white hen in an empty coop, looking at the fox’s smiling, giggling face and thinking those laughs were for her. That somehow she’d overcome the instincts of the obligate carnivore.

And she didn’t _see it_.

But Chris did. He saw it very well, in fact.

Chris ground his teeth together, his jaws straining as he watched her pull away from the man, put one of her hands on his face. He said something and she smiled, then he bent down and kissed her. Jill didn’t move away, didn’t seem shocked — when he pulled back, she followed him, tugging him down to her by the lapels of his jacket. He tipped over and caught his balance against her and they both laughed, a scene that seemed so innocent, but Chris knew better.

 _Your friend,_ he thought, and as the rain drove in plinking musical notes against the roof of his car, the blistering anger became _his_ friend, so much more palatable than confusion, so much more welcoming than heartbreak, so much more understandable than despair. _Your fucking **friend.**_

They weren’t the same at all. They never had been.

Chris started the engine of his car and drove away. He had seen enough.


	12. I've Got This Friend

February 6, 1999

  
It was warm for a February — almost unseasonably so. It barely dipped below the 50s that week, and the broad swaths of whirling snow had melted to rain that pelted the pavement and hid everything under an intimate blanket of fog. March was muscling in on February’s territory, just as tired of the crusts of ice and howling blasts of arctic wind as everyone else in D.C.

Jill went for a run outside that day, her first in almost half a year. Something in the world had shifted towards a direction that felt more like sense and less like despair. Answers were slowly filtering in, like the bright emerald green patches of grass persisting through the milky fog. Survivors were finding each other; some of them were seeking justice; some of them were taking concrete steps towards that justice, despite their wounds. The world was starting to make sense, peeking out from under a blanket of hopelessness. And what didn’t make sense was starting to look small, less intimidating under the light of day, like a predator which turned out to just be the eyes on the wings of something small, afraid to be eaten.

So, Jill ran, what was once so easy and came so naturally after her high school years of devouring tracks and winning ribbons and medals, and though her body complained and wheezed and ached, it was an ache that felt like it was for a purpose.

She could endure anything, if she felt it was for a purpose.

Perhaps today she’d hop a Greyhound and visit the bank in Indianapolis, and with it, her safe deposit box.

***

  
“So Kennedy’s got this friend, right,” Carlos said, as he scraped a knife full of butter onto his baked potato. Jill truly had no idea how the man ate the way he did and still looked like he did; if she so much looked sideways at half of the things he ate she’d probably weigh about 200 pounds by now. She figured it was the same reason he had eyelashes that were three times as nice as hers that he would never really use, an unfair advantage of male genetics. “College-type, pretty good with computers. She made one of those website things where we can all find each other and give it out to the other survivors to see if anyone is lookin’ for us, too. Like one of those bulletin boards where you’d post up pictures of missin’ and found people, but on the internet.”

Jill’s eyebrows lifted, impressed. “That’s… a good idea. How do you get to it?”

“He gave me a note with a bunch of letters and stuff. Looks like a code or somethin’. I figured you’d know what to do with it.” He dug in his pocket and retrieved a folded piece of note paper with a single, lonely sentence printed at the top in an even, steady hand of tiny letters — a website URL.

“Oh yeah,” Jill said, pointing to it in indication, “this is like a pathway. You type it in and it takes you to the website. I can show you how to work it if you want.”

“Never been good with that stuff, but I can try. More of a hands-on kind of guy, I guess.”

“I might have gotten that impression a time or two.”

That caught him off-guard; his chest twitched in a silent laugh, and he cocked an eyebrow at her. “I bet you have.”

Jill looked at the note and smiled. It was only a squiggle of random letters and slashes, but to her, it signified something bigger, something like hope and its fleeting glimmer. 

“I’m really proud of us, you know,” she said.

Carlos finished chewing his bite of food and washed it down with a swig of his beer. “Oh yeah? How so?”

“It’s this terrible thing that happened…” she said, “And here still are these every day people, not superheroes, and we’re trying to make it right. College students making websites, people like you and me who are pulling… bright spots out of it, I guess.” A smile pulled at her mouth, and she let it. “Makes me optimistic for the future. Like something better is coming.”

Carlos smiled back at her, a slow thing, like dawning realization. “A bright spot,” he said, “I like that.”

Jill had said it without thinking about it, one of those things that you only realize you’d given shape and life when the other person reacted to it. Now that _it_ — whatever was going on here, between them — had been spoken into the universe, even just as something as nebulous as this, Jill felt the burning need to correct the record, to get in front of it, to steer the boat to clear waters, free of confusion and omission.

“This is… out of nowhere, I realize… but something’s been bugging me.”

Carlos’ smile faded. The expression it settled into looked remarkably similar to the one from the helicopter, that day. “Okay…”

“You’re probably sick of hearing about Umbrella this, Umbrella that…”

She had been. She still was.

“But it’s always going to be there, until it’s not anymore. There’s always going to be three—” _in this relationship_ , she almost said, and one of his eyebrows quirked up, “—what I mean to say is that it’s always going to be in the background.”

Carlos looked at her, his face neutral, but the flicker of his eyes searching her face spoke something else. 

“What’re you sayin’?” His voice was a bit quieter.

“We have to be honest with ourselves about how often it’ll play a role, because it will be a lot. That has to be something you’re okay with, if we’re…” Jill fiddled with her hands, lacing them together, unlacing them, then sighed, frustrated. “If we’re… doing _this_. You know what I mean.” 

Carlos’s eyes were downcast, tapping a finger on the table while he thought. “That all that’s buggin’ you?”

Jill nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her. “Yeah.”

“You know… you don’t come out and say you’re sorry, but you’re always tryin’ to make sure _I’m_ okay with stuff, or you get close to bein’ open with me then you pull back real fast, like I’m gonna just decide it’s too much and fuck off to Abu Dhabi or somethin’. I was there too. I wanna to put my boot in their ass just as much as you do, but you lost way, _way_ more than I did.”

Jill shifted, uncomfortable. “I do?”

“Yeah.”

She shook her head, and lied. “I don’t know.” 

“Look. I…” he looked at her for a long moment, stopped himself and breathed out what sounded like defeat, like he was going to say something but thought better of it. “It’s a big deal to you, so it’s a big deal to me. We’ll handle it.” There was that sincerity again, so open and unvarnished that Jill had initially assumed it was some kind of act, the good cop routine to his bad cop that never came. If it was an act, it was an extraordinarily long con. “ _If_ we can talk about sports or somethin’ from time to time.”

Jill was no stranger to the motivations of men. Her teenage years had barely begun when she'd noticed the way that men looked at her started to change; suddenly there was an expectant, servile kindness where before there was indifference. She'd been through a few boyfriends before she realized that most of them were the same. They insisted she had _walls_ they were going to get around, like she was some sort of prize waiting on the other side of a self-inflicted prison, a weak girl who’d erected a protective barrier to keep from getting hurt. Always probing for that soft core they insisted hovered just below the surface, willing it into existence if they'd just push, ask, dote, control hard enough. 

What none of them realized was that Jill had always been like this, even as a little girl with skinned knees and french braids, chasing off bullies with heavy wooden sticks and rocks hurled from tiny hands. She was tough and no-nonsense, thoroughly invested in saving herself, a lesson drilled into her from infancy by her father. She was the wall. There was nothing on the other side, no maiden fair — just brick. When people realized that, they drifted off, disappointed, like children who’d realized there was no dessert after a dinner full of vegetables. They all did.

And here was Carlos, not trying to knock that wall down, but painting murals on it, leaning against it to rest when his own strength had flagged, picking up the bricks and poking them back into the holes when they’d fall, making her toughness a thing to be celebrated, not defeated. Something that completed her, not kept her from being complete. Something he liked her _because_ of, not _in spite_ of.

And that made all the difference.

“We can do that,” Jill said, and realized something had changed; something elemental had ground to a different position under their feet. She wasn’t sure what, not at that moment. But something was different. She smiled at him. “But the Giants still suck.”

Carlos’ eyes widened, scandalized, and he groped, blind, for an unopened straw on the table. “That’s a hell of a thing for you to say to me after everything we’ve been through.”

Jill shrugged away, held up her hands when he shot her with the paper covering of the straw by blowing into it, direct on the side of her head. “0-14, last I checked?”

“Right for the fuckin’ jugular,” he laughed, “big talk for someone whose gonna have to find her own way home.”

Later on when dinner was finished and beers were drained, Jill did what Jill did best for the second time that night: she got in front of the unspoken.

“You said you needed help with this, right?” She said, tapping the paper.

Carlos nodded, his fingers laced together. He leaned forward, tilted his head to look at the note, like he was trying to read the code from across the table and couldn’t. “Sure it’s not hard, but I don’t really deal with that stuff a lot.”

“Well, I’ve got a computer, and my internet just got hooked up the other day. If you wanna head back with me, we can look at it together.”

Carlos squinted at her, like he was trying to figure her out.

“Don’t get any bright ideas.” Jill said, balling up her napkin and tossing it onto the table. “This is completely work-related.”

“Mhm. Of course… you’d, uh, need some kind of payment for your time.”

“That’s awfully generous of you.”

“You know me,” he spread his hands in an approximation of a shrug, “I’m a giver.”

Jill nodded. He was, at that. “I’m sure we can figure something out.”

Jill and Carlos never had another _talk_ beyond this one — there was no dramatic will-they won’t-they _are we a couple or not?_ sort of conversation between them. No affairs from lack of clarity, no distance, just the comfort of things coming together as they did, on their own time. Jill eased into it slower than he did, as was her tendency, freezing and looking for an exit when things jogged her baser instincts. Eventually she learned to stop distrusting his intentions when he’d say something sparkling but stupid, and Carlos eventually realized that maybe freedom — which now read to his brain as uncertainty, as being unhooked from his moors and set adrift — wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Being anchored wasn’t so bad, maybe, as long as what you were anchored to was better than the sea. Maybe he was just growing up.

Jill decided she liked having someone who picked up her bricks, planted gardens around them when she felt the world thought they were ugly or unwieldy, and sometimes even threw them at people when she wasn’t able to. For Carlos’ part, he didn’t see a wall keeping him out. He saw honesty and integrity, somewhere he could take shelter if the rain got too cold. And maybe, just maybe, something to take care of when the weather ate into the stone. 

***

  
May 3, 1999

Things moved slowly, then in a great frenetic rush, as they often did. March rolled in like a bully backed by a street gang of mist and constant rain, gobbling up February’s claim to Washington with spills of early daffodils and budding leaves. Jill’s birthday came and passed in early April — she’d forgotten it, but Carlos didn’t, showing up to her door with flowers and a box full of cupcakes.

The change of the seasons came with other changes, too. Jill took the bus ride to Indianapolis, emptied her safe deposit box of all the files, all her evidence, all the copies of the things she’d stored there after July of last year while the teller watched with uncomfortable surprise. Wesker had taught her early on that having redundancies of redundancies socked in different holes like some kind of small mammal seemed paranoid, but was good sense. How ironic that his own logic would be used against him, one final time.

Jill set her wall back up, a corkboard filled with photos and documents and strings of brightly colored twine connecting the two in jags, sheafs of bloodstained paper collected from final her traipse through Raccoon City stuffed into the periphery, filling the holes. She thought about Chris — he hadn’t been in contact for months, since that day when she’d kicked him out of her apartment. No pages, no letters, nothing. Jill thought of calling to apologize and bury the hatchet, but was sure she had nothing to apologize _for_ , and therefore remained unmoved.

The first time Carlos saw the board, he’d looked at her like he was worried about her, like she’d just shown him her prized collection of small animal remains. She knew how it looked, she said, but this is how the police did things. Eventually he sat down and listened to her explain the timeline, and supplanted his own scant knowledge. Mostly, he just listened, with a breed of what appeared to Jill to be shame.

Then, one day in early May, when the wind blew soft and the dogwood trees began to shed their petals, Jill received a letter with an official seal.

  
***

  
They were having lunch in the hangar that same day around that same metal lattice table ringed with benches, burgers and fries and soda from some local fast food joint. Carlos could feel his arteries hardening; these jokers ate nothing but trash, and despite their deployments and all the running and weightlifting and sparring matches at the boxing gym he cared to do, between this and the new-relationship bonding over food that he and Jill indulged in, Carlos had gained about fifteen pounds. Every time he’d try to order something healthy, they’d jeer at him and call him a _metrosexual_ , the new term for men who took care of themselves. Carlos drew the line at drinking soda, though. Even he had standards. That shit was gross.

Carlos was trying to push his fries off on Kennedy, when Kevin slapped Carlos’ arm to get his attention, his mouth full of soda, pointing to the newly-installed television that was supposed to be for official business, but mostly just stayed parked on the local rerun channel while they worked. Kevin swallowed, then said, loudly: “Look! Look!”

They all turned to the set.

“Breaking news story coming through from Washington D.C. this morning, Chet. A spokeswoman for United States President Bill Clinton has confirmed to Channel 8 Action News that the Department of Justice _will_ bring charges against pharmaceutical supergiant Umbrella, and that the Department of Justice is suing to disband the mega-corporation, citing crimes against humanity following the incident in Raccoon City, late last year. We’re going to our reporter in the field, Marion O’Brien. Marion?”

“Thank you, Sandy. Alyssa Ashcroft, a journalist from Raccoon City, has absolutely rocked D.C. this morning with the release of a blistering expose against Umbrella, which she says exposes the incident in Raccoon City not as an accident or a biochemical spill, but an act of war with bioweapons that are clearly outlawed under international conventions. She has released what she alleges is body-cam footage from the incident, but she has refrained to release them to the press without the context of the entire documentary, which we will be airing tonight at 8pm EST.”

Carlos sank back against the table, silent. “Oh, my God.”

“I KNOW HER!” Kevin cried, pointing at the TV, then leapt to his feet and did a little touchdown dance. “Fuck yeah! Fuck. Yes. That’s my girl, Lyss!” 

Kennedy stalked away from the table, food forgotten, already on a telephone call with someone else, who was yelling at him in excitement from the other line in a cartoon squiggle of a voice.

One of the other men on the team — Keith, his name was, a huge black man with a voice so deep it sounded like someone had put it through one of those changers they used when a witness came out against the mob — put his hand over his mouth, like he was thinking, and then dissolved into a peal of gasping sobs. Carlos reached a steadying hand to him, tentatively, expecting to be shoved away, and the man leaned in close, cried into Carlos’ shoulder. Carlos sat for a moment with his fingers spread and his hand in the air, unsure of what to do, but then simply wrapped his arm around Keith, gave him a heartening shake. 

“I’m sorry,” Keith blubbered, “I’m sorry man, just…”

“Don’t be,” Carlos said, “you’re good. You’re good.”

Carlos’ phone rang, jingling against his hip, and he pulled it out with his free hand, hit the accept button without checking the display.

“Did you see the news?!” Jill demanded, breathless.

“I saw,” Carlos said, his voice full of solemn wonder, “holy shit.”

“That’s not all,” Jill said, “I got a letter today. I’m being ordered to testify in front of _Congress_.”

Carlos fell silent. “What?”

“She did it, Carlos. She fucking did it!”

“Whoa whoa whoa, wait. What? You gotta slow down.”

“Hi Jill!” Kevin called, over Carlos’ shoulder. Jill laughed, a warm sound, and said, “tell him I said hi.”

Then she continued. “Don’t you see? It’s moving. The case. They —” The grin was evident in Jill’s voice, even over the static of the telephone. “The prosecution is collecting witnesses — they’re suing them. They’re really doing it. The US government is, they’re suing them.”

“So?”

“So, they sue them and they disband. That’s how it works with big companies.”

“Huh. You’re going to do it?”

“Of course I am. This is our chance, Carlos. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

Carlos thought about it, between the man against his shoulder and Jill’s voice on the phone. Kevin had ambled over and was rubbing Keith’s back, trying to speak words of encouragement. Kennedy was gripping his phone, knuckles white, his jaw working and his eyes distant. So many people had been hurt, hurt in ways that would never recover, just… _because_. Because what? Money? Power? Influence?

Carlos thought of the hitman from January; that skinny, greasy fuck. _Put a bullet in my head, they’ll send me back. They’ll send me back._

Now, with this talk of exposes and subpoenas and trials, it made sense. They knew this was in the works. They surely had their dirty fingers everywhere in Congress, too much money to be made and lost any other way. Umbrella was trying to silence him on that snowy street, trying to make sure those bullets hit his brain or his heart to ensure what had happened in Raccoon City stayed a secret. That what Doctor Bard knew — and in turn what Carlos knew — died in the ashes of that city, along with its people.

No such fucking luck.

“Well, fuck it,” Carlos said, “let’s do it. Let’s get ‘em.”

“Are you sure?” Jill said, effusive, excited. “You got my back?”

Carlos watched this Alyssa woman, tall and skinny and blonde, talk to the reporter, but her words were lost under the thunder of his thoughts. He nodded to himself.

“Always.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (( Hey everyone! I've been pumping these out pretty quick lately cause I've had a ton of free time -- I try to write 1k words a day so short chapters get turned over fast at that clip. Things might slow down for a bit because of real-life stuff going on, but I wanted to get to the end of "Act II" before that happened. So here it is! Thanks for your comments and your kudos, I just wanted to tell you that you guys make my day and encourage me even if it's just a single word. Love to you all, hope you're staying safe and healthy! <3 ))


	13. Would?

May 3, 1999

Raccoon City was a place of tragedies as varied and personal as a fingerprint. Those September days, hot and rainy in turn, left their bloody marks on people in ways that were so intimate that no two survivors had the same experience. What one saw the other could rarely relate to; what the other lost, one could only dream of. Limbs. Children. Mothers and fathers. Hometowns.

Leon was one of those people. What he lost wasn’t so concrete as an arm, or a parent, or a house. It was something that couldn’t be seen, but had to be felt through its absence: the part of himself that hoped for things, that believed in the good of people. Took it for granted. He mourned that absence every night while he was alone with Jack Daniels, the man who’d become his best friend since 1998. His only friend, really. The only one who made it go away, if only for a little while.

Leon drove home that day in May in a fog, distracted inside his own head. He’d almost gotten into a car accident, almost rear-ended someone because his mind had drifted off of the road. The man had climbed out of his station wagon, body language tensed for a fight, but then had saw Leon’s combat fatigues and thought better of it, his tone suddenly apologetic and deferential. Just as well — Leon wasn’t listening. Not really.

That night at 7:45pm, as promised, Leon placed his phone base on the coffee table between the television and the couch that doubled as his bed, poured himself a shot, and dialed Claire’s number. He’d had time to get into the sauce a little bit before he called her. Took the edge off.

“Hey, you!” She said, over the phone’s grated speaker. “Gimme a minute, okay? I gotta go put Sherry to bed, then I’m all yours.”

“Okay.” Claire always talked to him this way, with the familiarity of a close friend, vivacious and sweet like sugar. She didn’t seem to mind when he didn’t know what to say. She was a woman who did scores of emotional labor for those around her — she’d run down her older brother, Chris, into a warzone. She’d made a good faith effort to join whatever survivors remained together, even talked about starting a nonprofit for them and their legal, medical struggles. Most seriously, at the tender age of 19 and halfway through her tenure in college where most girls were partying and getting hammered on the weekends, Claire had adopted a child. A little orphan named Sherry, a girl of 9 whose parents had died in the same event that had brought them all together. When Leon had expressed doubts that adopting Sherry was a good idea at this juncture of her life, Claire had said something that stuck with him: _She saved me just as much as I saved her. I’m not really her mom, but, I don’t know — it’s like we adopted each other. We’re a family now. You, too._

Claire had to drop to half-time in school, take another job to make ends meet, but didn’t appear resentful or bitter. She glid across the waters of her new life with the grace of a swan, a tiny, strange hatchling of another nest tucked under her wing. Somehow supporting someone else’s weight while her own hung precarious in the balance.

Leon wondered how she did it. Those same waters threatened to drown him every day.

Claire returned. “Okay, I think she’s down. What station was it?”

Leon told her. The news anchors were doing their preamble, talking about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, like every other station. Leon might have been the only 23-year-old man in history that was sick of hearing about blowjobs.

They listened to the anchors switch topics, and talk about Alyssa — Alyssa Ashcroft, who was supposedly a survivor of what had been dubbed “The Raccoon City Incident”. Incident. Like a train crash or a chemical spill. 

Leon didn’t know Alyssa, but Kevin did. At least he said he did.

“Hm. Did you run into her?” Claire asked. “She’s pretty.”

“No,” Leon said, though the short, modern clip of her hair and the confident, slightly exasperated way she spoke reminded him of someone else he’d met in September. Most things did, if he was in a certain sorry mood. “I don’t think so. I didn’t see many people.”

“Okay,” Claire breathed, like she was getting ready to skydive. “Let’s do this.”

***

  
Somewhere far away across the city, Chris Redfield was alone. 

He sat in the ominous darkness of the motel room, perched on the edge of the mattress, rocking his heel against the floor. The television blared blue and white into the shadow, lit his handsome face and the crags of tension it held like an Easter Island statue. The television was tiny, from the 80s at least with a pair of metallic antennae to pull down a picture from basic cable, where the screen rolled every few frames. It was chained to the stand with a padlock. It was enough.

He watched, twitching and laser-focused, the rest of the world dissolved away. There was only he and Umbrella, an affair where he was comfortable. Where he knew what to expect. A refuge, of sorts.

Then, over the speakers, a familiar voice — thoughtful and feminine, projected. An air of authority.

 _Voice of Jill Valentine, former Raccoon City Police_ , said the on-screen marquee, though she was embodied by a featureless, vague human shape on the screen, as if she hadn’t wanted to show her face.

She talked about a few things, interspersed in snippets, used to bolster the points the reporter was making, going down the line. Like a headlight, one stood out:

“They had disbanded us,” she said, “our unit — STARS. We were the pride of the force, but after we visited the mansion in the Arklay mountains, once we returned, the case was closed with no explanation. We were told we’d lost our jobs. Told not to investigate or there would be trouble. Like they were hiding something.”

_I asked Officer Valentine if the bioweapons she saw in that Mansion were the same that she’d saw on September 28._

“The same,” Jill’s voice went on to say, “if we’d been allowed to conduct an investigation, we could have stopped this. We had irrefutable proof that it was Umbrella. But someone didn’t want us to, under threat of death.”

_They threatened your life?_

“Yes.”

Chris lit another cigarette, his fifth in the last half hour. 

  
***

  
In her penthouse, all-white and stark and smartly furnished, Alyssa was pacing. Her bare feet pattered against the shine of the floor, over the ornate rug, and back again. 

“Too on-the-nose,” she said, “I should have let her explain it. It sounds like I’m leading her. Fuck, I knew I should have taken more time in post.”

Kevin offered her another beer. She waved it away, and then when he took it back, she thought better of it and took it from his hands, twisted off the cap and took a greedy swig.

“Calm down,” he said, “this is amazing. I don’t think it’s too… whatever you said. Come sit down.”

Alyssa sighed, and followed him to the couch in front of the television. Her posture was tense and rigid, as if she was still standing, just at half-height.

“I can’t watch,” she said, “I need to turn this off. I can’t.”

“Well, I’m going to watch it.” Kevin said. “You can go or stay, but I’m invested now.”

Alyssa glared at him. “This is my apartment.”

“Yeah, so?”

She quieted, then. She could have argued — one of her strong suits, in fact — but she didn’t have the energy for it nor the heart. Not against him, not against the strange black magic that hovered around him, warding off her incisive nature and her need for conflict. Alyssa had many work associates. She had admirers and colleagues. But friends… she’d never been very good at friends. Somehow this tragedy forced her into it, took and gave in equal measure. 

She’d considered many times just never responding to Kevin ever again, leaving him in the rear-view mirror and with it their connection to that smoking crater. Moving on. Maybe if this won her a Pulitzer, she’d be whisked away into another echelon of glitz and importance and their friendship would just die a natural death, too mismatched to survive. But then, with a note of uncharacteristic shame, she’d recall how he’d always come back for her, for them, even in the grimmest of situations. Situations when he could have run, or let nature take its course, harvested their resources to help himself survive. What she probably would have done, in his situation. How he’d doubled back for George when George passed out from exhaustion, hit his head on the pavement — she and Kevin both had drug him by his arms. Alyssa had been so convinced they’d had to leave him behind, that they couldn’t afford to be slowed down, but Kevin refused, and she couldn’t leave Kevin. So they’d drug him. 

Kevin even went back for Cindy. Even when she broke her leg, he tried… even when _they_ had caught up, were pulling on her legs, dragging her back into the crowd, and…

Alyssa shoved the image, the screams that ended with a gunshot, the tears that he’d tried to hide by pulling out in front of the pack, out of her mind. 

Half of her wanted to leave it. Half of her was convinced that she couldn’t leave it. She wished one side would win.

“Lyss,” Kevin said, jogged her back to present moment. Alyssa looked up at him, his gray eyes questioning.

“I’m good,” she lied, and cleared her throat, “sorry.”

They watched in silence.

  
***

  
The next morning, Carlos rolled into the hangar, fuzzy-headed from lack of sleep. The mood was dim, heads bowed and silence absolute. No chatter, no radio. No TV. No paper balls flying back and forth. No tinkering clinks and clunks of metalwork. A hole — someone was missing.

Carlos came near, cautious, like a man approaching a rattlesnake. He sat beside Kevin, his usual spot. 

“What’s goin’ on?”

Kevin shook his head, swallowed hard, and looked up. Tears streaked wet into the red scrabble of his beard, and he wiped them on his t-shirt, sniffled. Carlos struggled to make sense of what he was seeing.

“It’s Keith, man,” Kevin said, voice wet and thick, “he…”

Realization dawned like sinking into black depths at the bottom of an ocean. Carlos’ stomach dropped.

“You serious?” His voice was small, quiet.

Kevin nodded. “Last night.”

Carlos sighed and leaned his head on his hands. His brain returned to Tyrell, walking a well-worn path, smooth from use. Of letters to widows, of how Ayesha Patrick had gotten one look at him on her doorstep in Atlanta late October last year, the greens of the trees still green and the oily Southern summer still lingering long past its welcome, despite paper cutouts of Jack o Lanterns and bats strung about the neighborhood. How she had at first wailed and refused to see Carlos, slammed the door in his face, knowing what it meant. Knowing what Tyrell’s letter, with no Tyrell to accompany it, meant. 

Carlos realized then — there most likely was no widow, nobody to deliver letters to. Keith and Ayesha were the same. The one left behind, waiting for some sort of justice to be done before he could rest. Now it was here.

Across the table, Kennedy’s young face seemed to earn a line or two that day, distant and sad. 

The funeral the next week was small, only these six in an otherwise empty church. Keith had nobody else, Carlos realized. They’d been his family, for however short a time they’d had together.

A Baptist preacher rained hellfire from his pulpit, and from what Carlos heard in the spaces between where his attention flagged in and out, the man was using it as a performance piece for himself, garments waving with dramatic gestures, as he warned against the sin of suicide. 

***

  
Jill didn’t watch the expose like everybody else had. Carlos had offered to be with her if she wanted to, but it wasn’t a consideration; she’d lived it, up close and personal, and didn’t see a reason to do so again. She’d left him to it.

That morning on her run, even over the thump of music piped directly into her ears, the story was like an ex-boyfriend, hard to shake and insistent. It screamed from the print on newspaper stands — **UMBRELLA IMPLICATED IN CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY!**. It played on television displays in store windows, people gathered around in gaggling flocks, watching the grisly body-cam footage as it looped over and over. People talking, not everybody believing, but people talking nonetheless.

Alyssa had gotten what she wanted. 

For the first time in months, Jill remembered the man in the black van. His revolver. The squealing tires. Carlos’ blood. She couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t the victory they’d assumed when the news had broken, and considered the tendencies of cornered animals. How, when given the choices between fighting and death, fighting was always the preferred option.

Jill looked over her shoulder for the black van. She saw nothing, but her instincts had never betrayed her, and they yelled at her to get off the street. She turned and headed back the way she came, watching all the while.


	14. We're In This Together

_“We are so focused on our search for the truth that we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there whether we see it or not. It doesn’t care about our needs or wants… it will lie in wait for all time. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?”_  
_— Valery Legasov, Chernobyl_

  
May 10, 1999  
Washington D.C.

  
It was Friday. Friday meant a few things. There was more traffic. More cars. More people around — more people watching. It made concealing things more difficult, the chances of police higher. Chris was at a point where the police didn’t matter anymore.

Chris had been watching. Collecting patterns. Making some sort of sense of all of the pieces. In a time not so long ago, this would have made him feel strange — intrusive. Creepy. Of all of the watching, all of the waiting he had done as a police officer, all of the sitting in cars and noting when Person A did Thing B, it was never watching people he knew. Never turning the eye inward. But times had changed, and he along with them. Necessity was the mother of invention, just as much as she was the mother of intercession. With any luck, she’d be giving birth tonight.

Fridays meant one thing with reliability: the large man in the wool coat. Carlos, Jill had called him. First-name basis. Chris had stared at the photo of him standing on the street corner, hands in his pockets and face turned aside, its grainy grey and black and white print, the blacks where his eyes should have been. He’d stared at the photo so long the man’s Latin features, broad and full and handsome by any objective measure, had morphed into something insidious. Underhanded. Evil.

 _Where are your eyes?_ He’d thought, after one long night of drinking. _Who took them? Who’d you give them to? Did you trade them along with your soul?_

Fridays meant Carlos Oliveira, so reliably in fact, someone else had also picked up the pattern. In a black van, a man sat, smoking a cigarette. Watching those granite steps, waiting. Chris knew who he was — one of the men from the photos. “The Driver”. The man wasn’t focused on Chris. Didn’t even know he was there. He waited, his eyes on the apartment. Chris also waited, his eyes on the man — the hawkish curve of his nose, the way his jowls drooped, interrupted by the hump of a subtle double-chin. The man saw something that jogged his attention — something coming down the street under the dark of night. He opened the door to his van.

Chris followed suit, opened the door of his truck.

“Hey,” Chris called to him, striding after the man across a square of vacant parking lot. The man’s hand, which had drifted towards the waistband of his pants, stopped, and he looked over his shoulder. “You got a light?”

“Huh?” The man asked, annoyed. “What?”

“I asked if you got a light,” Chris repeated, “your smoke. I left mine at home, and—”

Chris interrupted himself as soon as he was within reach, shoved the man against the side of the van hard enough to send him in a bounce off its dinged metal, back against his assailant. Chris’ fingers laced tight in a fist around the man’s thinning grey hair, the layer of hardened gel crunching in his palm like a sheet of paper. The man tried to fight back, tried to push back against Chris’ hand. The disparity of strength was obvious, to Chris. To the man it was terrifying, from the look on his face, now on the other side of a surprise attack.

Chris slammed the man face-first onto the side of the van. An angular _clang_ of bone hitting metal, a crunch as the weaker of the two gave way. The man’s face bounced off of the dingy black paint like a ball, and as he came away, his nose, crushed into a smashed pile of meat in the center of his face, poured like a spout, splashing against the paint’s gleaming polish in a trailing crimson blot. Once, Chris slammed his head against the car, twice, three times. By the third time, the man was begging for him to stop through broken teeth. Chris didn’t hear him. 

One of Chris’ arms wrapped around the man’s neck, and he dragged him back into the mouth of an alley to their left, where his screams wouldn’t echo into the street. Chris threw him stumbling to the pavement, disturbing a cluster of stray cats who had been feeding on something in the pile of trash bags. They scattered in a tawny flash, and the man fell, awkward and scraping, to the pavement below. Chris followed after, knelt over him.

Chris dug into the inner lapel of his jacket, retrieved a photo. “Do you know this man?” Chris asked, and thrust the photo towards him. 

The man shook his head. “You’re a fucking psycho,” he said, “I don’t know anything! Just tell me what you want, and…”

“ _Information_ ,” Chris said. “I want information. And I know you work for Umbrella. You’re going to give it to me.”

“I don’t know who that is,” the man breathed, his voice pitching high and low, like the squeak of a rusted door hinge. “Umbrella? You got the wrong guy.”

Chris straightened the man’s arm against the pavement, placed his knee against the hollow between where the bones met in the joint of his elbow, and leaned his weight down. The man screamed, tried to struggle away.

The man’s expression changed. His eyes closed, squeezed together. “Okay, okay,” he said, “look, we can make a deal. If you let me go, you’ll never see me again. Nobody’ll hear from me.”

“Tell me about Carlos Oliveira.” Chris said. “ _Now_.”

“I don’t know anything about—”

Chris let his weight fall, felt the bones grinding apart. Between his knee and the asphalt, something soft inside the man’s arm snapped, and he screamed.

“Tell me _who he is_.”

“Okay, okay, shit! Shit!” The man panted, shaking, his voice a high pitched squeal. “He’s a mercenary! A… fuck… he’s a mercenary. Ex-military. That’s all they told me.”

“Is he still on Umbrella’s payroll?”

“I ain’t got shit to do with him man, I’m just… just here for the girl. The one from the TV. She’s… she’s the payday.” He held his nose. “God _damnit_.”

“Where is he?”

The man spilled his guts. Locations, times, names. All of it. Of course, Chris couldn’t be sure they were true — torture a man enough and he’d tell you he’d bombed Hiroshima if it meant it’d get you to stop. But it was a starting point, better than what he had.

“You’re sure?” Chris asked, though it sounded more like a statement.

“I think so! I don’t know, man, I didn’t read his fuckin’ file. I’m just here for the girl.”

“…the girl.” Chris repeated, to be sure he’d heard it correctly.

“Yeah, yeah,” the man gasped, “the girl. Not your buddy.”

Chris considered this. “You promised nobody’ll hear from you.” He said, thoughtful.

“Promise. Not a word.”

Chris stood to his feet, slow and sure. The lines of his face, carved under the plays of shadow and ambient light spilled into the alley from its exit on the other side, looked as unlike mercy or kindness as anything the man had ever seen. 

“Not a word, you said.”

“Wuh—waitwait _wait_ —”

Chris wasn’t sure he’d dragged him far enough away from the street. Wondered if his screams would echo through the alley and exit somewhere further on. His instincts, whether they be toward the indifference of human nature or the science of violence had proven correct. Nobody came running, no hero yelling for him to unhand the man, whimpering and bloody under the repeated blows of Chris’ fists. No wailing police lights spun into view. Only darkness and rage and sounds of human pain. 

When the man’s unconscious body was found the next morning beside the dumpster by a hapless sanitation worker, Chris had been gone for hours. The man looked dead but was still alive, still trying to form words whimpered under shudders of pain, his head leaned on the ground. His assailant wasn’t to the point of cold-blooded murder. Not yet. But it had been a near-miss of a thing when the anger pumped, hot and blinding, and blinked everything else out of existence. Including the future. Including consequences. 

For his part, the man in the van kept his promise, one way or another. Nobody saw him again, on this street or anywhere else in Washington.

  
***

  
Carlos had missed guys’ night twice in a row, and hadn’t thought much of it at the time. He’d made the young man’s mistake which young men only learn to stop making through damnable experience: there were not eternal chances to make up days that had been given away. People were not here forever. The unit’s numbers were now one less, and while the party raged on around them, it felt different. Stayed in a part of his brain that he acknowledged but didn’t befriend.

Carlos explained to it Jill. He felt bad for skipping and couldn’t miss any more, though he didn’t explain why. She insisted she was okay with meeting on Saturday instead, in her easygoing sort of way, though her voice was full of questions. He noted them, but didn’t offer answers. 

Carlos decided to walk to the bar this time — about 45 minutes by foot, not bad — because he was expecting to get absolutely blitzed. Like, fresh out of Boot camp shore week _chug chug chug_ blitzed. The occasion called for it. The guys had worked through their grief and their anger, and were now in the stage of it which required a celebration of Keith’s life to close the circuit and move on. Carlos was unsure. It had been months going on years since he had been well and truly drunk. He needed more alcohol to get drunk than normal people did, and like most young people, tended to make bad decisions once he was in the bag. He had always preferred pot if he wanted to get ripped, anyway. Maybe he could convince Kevin to partake with him after they’d gotten done here. Kennedy was a boy-scout, more apt to tell on him and get him piss-tested than join in, and the rest were much older. Family men.

His building was clustered on a street corner between a small coffee shop which saw no traffic at all which Carlos could measure, and a Puerto Rican grocery store with a faded, cracked plastic sign. Small bars and seedy nightclubs packed the street on both sides. The heavy beat of electronic dance music and the manic, strident sounds of wailing electric guitars competed for dominance in the warm breeze. People laughed and talked. Their yells danced over the gouts of steam pouring from manhole covers and sewer grates. Empty beer bottles and plastic cups glittering in the gutters reflected buzzing, blinking neon signs in every color imaginable. He passed this scene, hands in his pockets, and once the familiar building came into view, wooden and squat under a blinking neon sign — _Charlie’s_ — Carlos pushed the wooden door open with one forearm, ducked inside. Kevin saw him almost as soon as he appeared, and waved him over, scooted over to make room. 

They did their normal drinking. Played darts. Kennedy embarrassed one of the other guys at pool, coming out of his shell by a touch. The night took a turn when the jukebox played something modern, not its usual 80s rock — someone had chosen _California Love_. Kevin made a face.

“What the fuck is this shit?”

“Hey. Don’t shit talk 2 Pac in my presence,” Carlos warned, “the hell’s wrong with you?”

Kevin squinted at him through a cloud of smoke. “You like this garbage?”

“That’s Doctor Dre, man,” Kennedy joined in, already halfway in the bag, “they’re fuckin’… geniuses. If you listened to anything made in the last decade, you might understand.”

Carlos laughed, pointing, as if to say _see?_. “When I’ve got Leon agreein’ with me, you know you fucked up.” Kennedy nodded as if to say it was true.

The song ended and a familiar peal of electric guitars squealed over the speakers, and Kevin was happy again.

“See?! _This_ is music,” he yelled, over the music, “not whatever hippity-hoppity shit that was.”

Carlos rolled his eyes. You could lead a horse to water, he supposed, the same way you could lead it to art. Wouldn’t keep it from eating the damn painting if it was a dumb-fuck like Kevin.

Kevin nudged him hard, under the table with his foot. “You wanna come outside for a smoke?”

Carlos didn’t smoke cigarettes, nor did the rest of the crew, meaning they’d be alone. Carlos nodded, guzzled the last of his beer, and followed after.

Kevin leaned against the wall and lit a Lucky Strike, but didn’t raise it to his lips. He watched the college girls walk by in their cutoffs and thong sandals, distracted but not interested. He rolled the smoke between his fingers, stared at it as it burned.

“Been meaning to ask,” Kevin said, “Jill’s gonna be at the trial, right?”

“That’s what she said,” Carlos leaned against the wall as well, his arms crossed. “She’s stressin’ about it, but she’s gonna rip ‘em open, man. She’s chomping at it to tell everyone what they did.”

Kevin nodded, a specter of a smile on his face. “She’s fuckin’ mean when she wants to be.”

“You got that right. Why, what’s up?”

Kevin shrugged, an uncomfortable gesture, like it had to be pulled out of him from his chest. “I dunno… I just… miss her, I guess.” He rushed to clarify: “Them. We weren’t like, close, or nothing. But she’s…” 

Carlos was quiet, let him finish.

“We don’t got too many of us left, you know? I was gonna ask if we could go, together. To the trial, to show support. If you’re gonna go.”

This surprised Carlos. Kevin was their good-time guy; he didn’t always keep things light, too mercurial, his heart affixed on his sleeve. But he was pure of intention in a way few people were, like a kid, no ulterior motive that lurked below the surface. Trials weren’t Carlos’ idea of a good time, either, but Kevin?

“Of course, man.” Carlos said. “You know you’re welcome any time. You don’t gotta ask.” 

Kevin brightened. “I appreciate that, dude.”

“I actually think the three of us should get together sometime and you guys can just catch up. You got a lot of common ground, no need to be a stranger. You know?”

“Huh.” This seemed to flatter Kevin and cheer him in equal parts. “Yeah. Yeah, we can hang out. You think she’d want to?”

“Yeah. I think she’d like that, too. She asked about you, if you were okay.”

Kevin smiled, opened his mouth to speak, but was distracted by a vehicle — a truck. Hunter green.

Carlos waited for a response, and when none came, he knocked his boot against Kevin’s sneaker. “You still with me?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kevin blinked back to Carlos’ question, “sorry. Just thought I saw a familiar face. I’m fucking _hammered_ , dude.”

***

  
It was 2:30 AM. The bars weren’t closed, yet, but the entire team was fall-over start-a-fight plastered and Carlos had seen enough. After he stowed multiple sets of car keys with the bartender and loaded them into multiple cabs, Carlos was sober enough himself to make the trek home. 

Carlos kept his eyes forward, hands in his pockets as he walked. Parties still continued, though there was more yelling and less people. As the wall of sonic distortion died in the background, the thumps of beats became muffled and flatlined, the chatter turned to whispers and eventual silence. The clomp of his boots on the pavement and rushes of air from cars as they whizzed past became the only soundtrack to this walk, the neon lights lay to sleep in blackness. 

Something tickled Carlos’ neck, raised a hand to rub it, and found nothing. After a few moments, footsteps scraped and tapped against the sidewalk, behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder.

Someone was following him. Walking turned out to be a pretty shitty call. Like everywhere else in the world, there were weirdos, and they came out at night. 

“Hey,” the man said, “I need to talk to you.”

Carlos shook his head and grumbled, but didn’t respond. He quickened his pace.

“Hey,” the man said to Carlos’ silence, “I said I need to talk to you.”

“Listen up, dickless wonder,” Carlos fired back, over his shoulder. There were a few cases when his Bronx accent would come out strongest: when he was angry or when he was telling people to fuck off. His words became clipped, dipped in and out of the dialect. “I didn’t respond the first time ‘cause I don’t give a shit. Fuck off somewhere.”

The man followed, undeterred. Carlos was well aware of his qualities which made him more apt to survive in these sorts of situations. He was strong as an ox, always had been, back to his schoolyard days where he’d been relied upon to flatten bullies who picked on the weirdos and the nerds. High school had been a while ago, almost ten years, but the reputation as an equalizer had stuck.

Nobody Carlos knew could call him “practical”, but violence was one of those topics where he favored experience and rationality. Street fights rarely ever ended clean and even the toughest dude could end up dead by assuming they would. Happened all the time at home. Tough guys stopped being tough real fast with a knife buried in their liver.

Though his brain had come around to defending himself if it came to it, Carlos was not _that guy_. The “tough guy” who thought the ability to hurt people made him special. Like most men who were dangerous, he knew he could hurt someone when he let loose. He avoided those situations the best he could — letting loose was his last possible option. He didn’t enjoy his legacy being one of hurting people.

It didn’t appear this man shared his philosophy, which put him in a tight spot which grew tighter by the moment.

***

“Won’t take long,” Chris said. He caught up with him, reached out and grabbed the man — Oliveira’s — shoulder, and something in his grip, fingers pinched too tight, grabbing into the lines between muscles made the man’s shoulder tense. “I just have a few questions for you—”

Oliveira whirled around, jerked out of his grip. He took a few steps back.

“You touch me again, and we’re gonna have a problem, man.” From this close, there was an obvious size disparity. Chris wasn’t a small man, not by anybody’s measure — five-eleven and somewhere in the neighborhood of 190 pounds, all solid, long, wiry muscle. The man before him had about three or four inches on him, broad and solid in places that suggested practical strength, not vanity. His knuckles and his face were both scarred in parts, split and healed together in shining lines of pale scar tissue against his olive skin. One of his ears puffed out like a cauliflower. He fought, maybe for a living. “I ain’t in the mood. I told you to fuck off. You go your way, I go mine. We understand each other?”

This close, Chris could smell the beer on him. Maybe his reflexes were slowed just enough to give him the upper hand. 

“I’ll tell you what I understand,” Chris said, “I understand you’re not so tough when you don’t have your fancy company gear on, or your little mercenary goon squad to back you up.”

Oliveira’s face strained, but not in confusion — like Chris had said something he didn’t expect him to know.

Chris took the opportunity. It might be the only one he would get. He rushed him, grabbed Oliveira by the collar of his t-shirt, bunched it around his knuckles. Chris dragged him into a nearby alley between two brick houses, and socked him against the wall. His weight was hard to move, but Chris had relied on something other than simple brute strength, and though it was a struggle, it ended with him in the high ground. 

“Look,” Oliveira said, his hands aloft in surrender. There was no panic in his expression, and he spoke with intentional slowness. “Just be cool. Nothing bad’s gotta happen. Just tell me what you want. Money? I got some in my wallet, okay?”

“You all sound the fucking same,” Chris snarled, and rocked him back against the wall, bumped the back of his head against the brick. “You talk so tough until you get separated from your friends, until someone gets you alone. Then the first thing you do is try to cut a deal. Beg for your life. You have five fucking seconds before I paint this wall with your face. Who is paying you to keep tabs on Jill Valentine?”

Oliveira’s bewildered expression settled into something like consideration. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” 

Chris slammed his fist into the exposed strip of skin of the man’s stomach. Oliveira leaned over, the air swooped out of him in a sick sucking sound. He coughed, swallowed hard, and cleared his throat. 

“Don’t fucking lie to me,” Chris said. “I know who you work for. I know who you are. And I know what you want.”

“Nobody’s payin’ me,” Oliveira said, “we’re…” he faltered, “nobody’s payin’ anybody, man.”

“Oh — so you’re friends. Right?”

Oliveira said nothing. Impatient, Chris punched him again, punched him so hard he could feel the thick muscle wall press back against his organs, jostle something important. The larger man made a gagging noise and swallowed, loud and wet. Chris slammed him against the wall again. Oliveira made a noise, part grunt and part something else, edged by a yelp of pain, his chin tilted to the sky.

“ _Okay_ ,” the larger man said, his breath short from pain. It sounded sarcastic. Chris begun to grow frustrated: blows which had toppled the earlier man over, sent him tipping in and out of consciousness, didn’t so much as carry this guy off of his feet. Like punching a heavy side of beef that dangled and swung, but always came back to neutral.

“She’s the payday. Right?” Chris said.

Oliveria caught his breath, his heavy eyebrows furrowed. “You got this all wrong. I don’t work for Umbre—”

This time Chris kneed him, full force. It made the other man vomit, spill a blast of what smelled like beer mixed with battery acid. It splashed on the ground and Chris hauled him to the other wall, slammed him stomach-first against it, bent one of his arms behind his back.

“You’re supposed to be this big, tough guy,” Chris said, his voice a whisper of promised menace, “but when someone big and tough gets in _your_ face… you’re kind of a bitch.”

Oliveira sighed, jerked a little in his grasp, tested Chris’ grip. Chris pressed on him, cranked his arm, felt the grind of his bones. Oliveira cried out through gritted teeth.

“If you like your arm only bending in one direction — _don’t._ ”

“Look,” Oliveira said, “I work for the Federal Bioterror Commission, okay? The FBC. I’ve got my I.D. in my—”

“I warned you about lying to me,” Chris said, leaned close to one of his ears. “You’re not going to get another one.”

“Look man, I get that whoever you are, you care about her. Okay? I get it. Grab my phone, in my left pocket. I’ll call her, she’ll set it straight, whatever you wanna know. Nobody’s gotta get hurt tonight.” 

Chris had been promised violence. By who or what, he couldn’t remember, but the lack of pushback made this victory thin and unsatisfying, like getting to the ring and your opponent shrugging. Giving you the W when you’d dreamed all day of taking it out of his blood. All he was getting was compliance, and it confused him. Perhaps easier to tolerate, the confusion stirred itself into a frothing anger as he stared at the man’s profile — his eyes, brown and tilted and frocked with long feminine eyelashes. Those eyes were enough to trick Jill. Chris wondered what other little houseflies he’d beckoned into his web before he spun them in silk and swallowed them whole.

Chris shoved his hand in the pocket of Oliveira’s jeans, against the big muscle of his thigh, retrieved his phone. 

Chris looked at the phone, tapped buttons with his thumb, the display shining onto his face. The phone rang and he hit the speaker button. **Jill** , said the display name.

Five rings. Six. Seven.

Jill picked up with a muffled click. Her voice was thick with sleep, soft. “Carlos? It’s almost 3 in the morning.”

“Hey,” Oliveira said, and forced himself to sound casual. It didn’t work, not to Chris’ ears, and if not to those, not to hers. “What’ve you been up to tonight?”

Silence. Chris’s eyes ground to a narrow slit, bored into Oliveira’ face like a drill. 

“Sleeping, until now,” she laughed, “I thought you were going out with the guys? This better not be a ‘I’m drunk and horny’ call, because…” 

Oliveira looked back over his shoulder, careful to catch Chris’ gaze as he spoke. “You sayin’ it wouldn’t work?”

Chris pushed on him. _Watch it_.

“Well… probably. But I’d still be mad at you.”

Chris’ grip faltered. Oliveira didn’t capitalize on it, didn’t move.

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Oliveira said, “you ever thought about workin’ for the FBC? We could use an infiltrator. The guys’ve been askin’ about you since you’ve been on TV.” 

Jill laughed, confused. “Not really? I’m pretty sure they’d frown on fraternization.” Silence, like dawning realization. “Wait… are you okay? You’re acting weird. I’m going to come down there. Where are you?”

Chris set his mouth in a line, disconnected before Oliveria could answer. 

“See?” Oliveria said. “Gave you what you want. I don’t work for anyone but Uncle Sam. She’s fine. Now we can call it square. Cool?”

Chris blinked, hard and fast. His fists shook. Like throwing something to the ground from frustration, he released Oliveira’s arm in a sudden shove. Once he was free, the man pushed himself off the wall and twisted away, got a few paces distance between them.

“I know who you are,” Chris warned, “and I know you’re Umbrella. I know what people like you do to people like us. Especially now.” Not her — _us_. Fuck. “I don’t know what your end game here is, but if you were smart, you’d find somewhere else to be.”

Oliveira dusted himself off. He looked at Chris’ face, and Chris tensed for a swing — none came. His brown eyes searched Chris’ expression, like he was trying to read Chris’ mind as he rubbed his sore elbow. 

“I get that you’re pissed,” Oliveira said, “I get it.”

“No, you don’t _get it_.” Chris asked. “You caused all of this. _All_ of it.”

Oliveira didn’t move, continued to search him. “If you’re Jill’s friend, we’re both on the same side. Even if you don’t know it yet. There’s been too much of people gettin’ hurt already. We don’t have to add to it.” He paused. “It don’t have to be like this.”

Chris paused. A familiar ringing, all at once distant and close, like a television tuned to static, wailed to a crescendo inside his brain. He blinked, rapid, tried to shake it. Chris took a step back onto the sidewalk. Oliveira followed him, at the same distance. 

“No.” Chris said, though his tone was weaker, less resolute. He’d been presented a flower where he expected a fist, and it made him more pissed, more shaky. _He_ was the one who’d gotten the upper hand here — _he_ was going to kill _him_. Oliveira had no right to speak to him so, like he was his friend, like he was granting _him_ reprieve. “No, we’re not. We will never be on the same side.”

Oliveira’s phone rang, a jaunty little jingle into the tense night air between them, comical in its bad timing. 

“I’m gonna answer that,” he said, “I don’t got a gun. It’s probably her.”

Chris stood, silent, as Oliveira did so. The conversation was short — _yeah, I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. I’m sure. Just go back to sleep, okay? It’s okay, we can talk about it later. Okay. Bye._

Oliveira looked at the phone, as if he was considering its color.

“I’m not gonna fight you,” Oliveira said, “so if it’s that important to you, make me go. Hit me with your car or whip out whatever piece you got and give me one in the dome. But you gotta understand that once the conversation becomes about Jill, and not about us,” his eyes flicked up to Chris, steady, “I ain’t so inclined towards cuttin’ you a break.”

Chris wanted to laugh, but didn’t. His eyes narrowed so hard they hurt. 

“You and me can have our differences. But once you tie her up in whatever beef you’ve got…” no fear, no tension, only concern and gravity, like he was explaining something deathly serious to someone who didn’t understand. “We’re havin’ a _completely_ different conversation.”

Chris bristled. Everything about him made Chris want to smash him off of every hard surface he could see. Most of all his soft tone, like he was doing Chris a favor by getting his ass kicked. Like he was some kind of hero, protecting his ward. The dragon trying to talk the knight down, while the quarry was still clutched in its claws, ready to have her head nipped off at dinner time.

Chris hated him for it. A deep, grinding hate in the basement of his soul.

“Is that a threat?” Chris asked.

A warm night breeze rustled over them, and Oliveira shook his head. “Depends on you, man.”

Chris nodded. Perhaps they weren’t so dissimilar after all — at least, not in the ways that mattered. Not about things like this. “Glad we understand each other.”

Chris left Oliveira where he stood, and the man watched him retreat. Chris lit a cigarette as he stalked away, the thump of his bootfalls the only sound for miles. The pierce of the ringing inside his head persisted, drilled into his brain from both sides. Chris' hands twitched and trembled, as if still hungry.


	15. Blind Trust

Chris stumbled into his motel room. The room smelled of mildew and cigarette smoke, lit dusty orange against upholstery every shade of rust and brown the human eye could determine. Chris did what he hadn’t done in months: he called Jill, forced fingers that shook and trembled to dial her number. Listened while it rang and rang. When her voice picked up on the machine, soft and thoughtful, he hung up. 

_Please,_ Chris thought, _please, just pick up._

Jill was the last. The last of the STARS, a team once dubbed the pride of Raccoon City’s police force, now a collection of forgotten headstones and dusty reams of junk mail stuffed into abandoned mailboxes with no new address to escape to. No future. Valor and honor and good intentions stolen. Snuffed out. 

Every last one of the team that survived had scattered like a fistful of ashes picked up by a baleful wind. Rebecca, young and enthusiastic and so bright she made Chris look like he’d suffered some sort of brain damage. She had packed her desk and left. No goodbye, no contact information. Fair enough — field work wasn’t for those who lacked the heart, and she’d been wise enough to know it. 

Barry, their resident patriarch, was as bent on revenge as the rest of them. His deep sense of loyalty had never recovered from being used as a pawn to further such injustice, and he was a non-stop apology machine where Jill was concerned. She’d become annoyed by it after about the second week. 

Barry was on board, and to hear him talk, he was ready for whatever murderous end awaited him in his search for Wesker, their former Captain. The betrayer. But then the worried faces of Barry’s girls — both under ten, and who both loved him with the fierce, innocent devotion of young children — had won out, and he’d whisked them and his wife somewhere far, far away, to the distant safety his native Canada. 

Chris shook his head. It pounded. His chest grew tense, and he felt his pulse in his ears. Oliveira’s soft tone, almost diplomatic, rolled like smoke inside his brain — _If you’re Jill’s friend, we’re on the same side, even if you don’t know it yet._

Chris hadn’t bought it. Not from Oliveira. But Jill — her voice lulled him into complacency. Convinced him. And now she’d suffer for his weakness, his lack of forethought. 

He dialed her number again, sat alone with the dial tone, and hoped to be proven wrong.

  
***

  
Carlos walked the rest of the way home. One of his arms was now his ‘good arm’; the other hurt, hurt bad, like he’d fallen and landed on it wrong. His elbow throbbed from the joint out, hot and stiff and swollen. At least it wasn’t his dominant arm, which he’d looped around his midsection over a solid bloom of bruises and ruptures, blood now clotted in hard oblong knots under his skin. Across the street, the parties had died to the thoughtful silence of early morning, the stretch of black nothing between last call and the lilted songs of birds. The neon lights of the club had been turned off to sleep for another night, and the street looked like a street again, not a circus. The darkness was a comfort.

As Carlos approached his apartment complex, he saw the toes of her white running shoes first. Jill sat, knees together, on the first step in the cement staircase. She was still in her pajamas — a tank top and tiny basketball shorts piped with gold around the edges. Jill never wore anything like that outside. She must have run out the door without stopping to change. 

Carlos considered a dive into the bushes or maybe behind the building, a sudden knee-jerk reaction of shame with no real anchor in reality. But this was Jill — as much as he didn’t want her to see _him_ right now, he’d struggled to remember a time where he hadn’t wanted to see her. 

“Hey,” Carlos said as he drew near, and tried for a smile. “You come here often?”

Jill turned to the sound of his voice and climbed to her feet. She went to him with a hand outstretched in concern, and touched it to one of his shoulders. 

“What happened?” Her eyes searched him — they paused for a moment on the torn rumple of his shirt collar, climbed back to his face. Carlos welcomed her roaming glances when they were a byproduct of hunger or desire. Not concern. Concern felt different.

“Aw. You worried about me?” He asked. She didn’t appear amused, and his tone sobered to reflect her seriousness. “Just a dust-up at the bar. Told you it wasn’t a big deal.”

Jill looked him straight in the eye. Her gaze flickered back and forth. 

“What?” Carlos asked, with an uneasy chuckle. When she didn’t trust what you had to say, she had eyes like x-ray vision, and sometimes he thought they would pierce through his skull to get to the truth. 

Jill shook her head. She slid her hand to his upper back, rubbed him there; a reassurance. “Lets get you laid down. Looks like you could use it.”

Jill followed him inside. Carlos kicked off his boots, sat on the edge of his bed, and laid back with a wince and a sharp gasp through his teeth. Once his head hit the pillow, Carlos closed his eyes; between the alcohol and the adrenaline it was hard to keep them open. Sleep rolled heavy and sudden like a dark thunderhead. The soft spider-creep of Jill’s fingers traced the center line of his stomach. After a moment Carlos put his hand on hers, gentle, to still it.

“Maybe later,” he said, and moved her hand away. Under the weight of his exhaustion, there was no stir from her touch. It would have to wait. 

“I’m _trying_ to look at your stomach,” she laughed, “Let me see.”

“It’s just a few punches in the gut. You’ve seen me bite it way worse than this. Promise.” 

“Don’t do the guy thing, okay? Even Mike Tyson uses an ice pack and a couple of Tylenol when he gets hurt. Do you have any actual medicine?” Jill stopped him when he opened his mouth to speak. “ _Not_ booze.”

He didn’t.

Jill looked in Carlos’ freezer and found emptiness in its gouts of cold steam save for packages of frozen vegetables. It seemed all he kept on hand was frozen broccoli, endless bags of chicken, eggs, condiments, rice. One of those bags of broccoli would have to be sacrificed for the greater good. She wrapped it in a ziplock bag found in a drawer, brought it to him, set it on his stomach over his t-shirt. He moved under it, unable to find a position where he was comfortable. Somewhere in the haze Carlos felt the bed compress under her weight as she picked over him, found a spot to settle between his arm and his torso. It reminded Carlos of a house-cat on tiny tentative feet, lowering down and curling in once they’d found a warm spot to nap. He put his arm around her.

“Did you know them?” She asked. The question reeled him back from the shallow waters of sleep.

“Hm?”

“The guy, from tonight. Someone you know?”

Carlos sniffed, cleared his throat. “No. Never seen him before. I was walkin’ home and he got the drop on me. Nailed me a few times, then ran away.” 

“Hm.”

Carlos hesitated, then said: “I was thinkin’… did you want to stay here for a few days?”

Jill’s expression was confused. “Well, that’s out of nowhere.”

It wasn’t. Not to him. And not to her, either, if she’d heard what he’d heard. He craned his head, repositioned it on the pillow to look at her. “I’m not askin’ you to move in or anything like that. I’d just feel better if we weren’t split up, until all this trial stuff’s done. It’s gettin’ crazy out there, and…” he trailed off.

“Aw, you offering to protect me? Or do _you_ need a bodyguard, tough guy?”

Carlos laughed along, but something in his face stilled her, and she fell into a silence that felt like consideration. Her eyes traced over him again, clear and steady as rain. 

“Okay,” she said, “if it’ll make you feel better, I can stay for a while. Until its done.”

“We can talk about it in the morning. Gimme a list of stuff and I’ll go…” he yawned, wide and loud, and it reminded Jill of the careless, bellowed yawn of a lion. “I’ll go… get…”

Carlos trailed off and sunk easy into the twitches and flutters of early sleep. Jill looked at his stomach; a hard, unrelenting force deep in her brain realized it didn’t believe him. It was well-known you had a good chance of getting jumped if you walked home in a rough place like downtown D.C. That wasn’t in question.

But the severity, the _timeline_ didn’t make sense. She’d seen Carlos in action. She’d seen the easy way he could move people if he wanted them moved, and unless he was held at weapon-point, some random tweaker couldn’t have beat him like this for his wallet or his phone even if they _had_ surprised him. His knuckles weren’t bloody or scraped, or even red. No physical evidence of a struggle on his part. 

When she’d first seen him have an honest go at someone — one of his old teammates, Nicholai — he’d jammed his thumb in the man’s eye, smashed Nicholai’s jaw into multiple pieces that floated inside his broken face with a single, freight train of a punch. She remembered being scared of Carlos in that moment, like she’d just realized someone you shook hands with had hidden a gun in there the entire time… they just hadn’t had reason to use it on _you_. Not yet.

Why would they try to shoot him, and de-escalate from there? Why wasn’t this also a hit attempt? These didn’t go backwards. You didn’t try to murder someone with a gun and later decide a few love-taps were how you convinced him you were serious. Maybe he wasn’t able to fight back. Maybe it was a message of some kind. 

Jill groaned against the spin of her brain. 4am was not the time to convince yourself of anything good, not if you wanted clear, rational answers. Maybe after some sleep they could talk about it again, make some sense of the situation.

As she closed her eyes, Jill’s curious brain brushed against Carlos’ question on that phone call. She’d said no — she saw how the FBC operated from an angle so close and grotesque where she wanted nothing to do with them as soon as they’d released her. But her own investigations had ground to a halt, the leads gone cold, trails evaporated. Maybe there was a way not involving field work. At least until she was better. The FBC weren’t perfect, but maybe they were her best bet, as committed to putting their boots on Umbrella’s neck as she was — whatever it took.

And wasn’t an enemy of her enemy her friend?

Maybe not a friend. But a partner.

Jill’s eyes blinked open, and trailed along the lines of Carlos’ throat. He still bore the scar of the charred black line where the bullet had missed him.

Maybe.

  
***

  
Carlos’ dreams were filled with words.

_I know who you are. I know what people like you do to people like us. We will never be on the same side._

_What people like you do to people like us._

_What people like you do._

_people like you_

As he slept, Carlos dreamed of the angry, snarled mask of the man’s face, and of Keith: so tough and sure and diamond-hard, until he blew off his own head to escape what banged around inside it. 

  
***

  
When Jill failed to answer the phone the next day, and the next, and the next, Chris went to her apartment, rang her number. Someone let him in and he knocked on her door, knocked for twenty minutes, until someone screamed _“THEY’RE NOT THERE, SHUT THE FUCK UP!”_ from an adjacent unit. No answer, no movement from inside. Silence. He considered kicking the door in, and thought better of it — it would attract the police, if he hadn’t already. 

Chris called Claire, asked if Jill had been in touch. Maybe she had called someone, reached out to someone through the page Claire had made on the Internet. Claire turned out empty hands as well, but couldn’t be one-hundred percent sure. She was at work, in the middle of the lunch rush against the sounds of clanking dishes and bellowing line cooks. She told him she could double-check later when she got home, and hung up.

Later that day, Chris called the rental office number printed on the front door of Jill’s complex. Pretended to be Jill’s boss, asked the lady who answered if she’d seen Jill around — she had a last check due to her and it had come back as no tenant at address, had she moved out? Did she leave an address it could be forwarded to?

“Hmm,” the woman had said, “her bills are paid up, but she pays in advance. She’s quiet. I haven’t seen her in a while, but she didn’t break her lease. What did you say your name was again?”

Chris had nobody to blame but himself. Easy to say but hard to accept.

He had let Oliveira go.

  
***

  
Somewhere after midnight, Chris returned to the scene of the crime and parked far away from Jill’s door with the intention of getting into the building and finding out exactly what had become of her, and where. The silence had given him enough time to fill in the mysteries with his own worst case scenarios, allowed him to imagine whatever breed of tragedy he’d cared to. Images of her body, lonely and curled on itself in the purple mottle of death, skimmed across his mind so vivid and strong they turned his stomach. 

As Chris shouldered the truck’s door open, the gauzy yellow light from the complex’s doorway darkened, blotted out under the shadow of a large frame. Like a bad dream, Oliveira emerged, the dark colors of his hair and skin an open challenge to the light which surrounded him. For a moment, he sucked everything bright into his vortex. 

Chris didn’t get out. He closed the door, slowly.

Oliveira carried something, tucked under the heft of one of his arms, against his side. Chris squinted. A cardboard box. The box was stuffed to the brim with things — objects. File folders. Oliveira looked over his shoulder like he expected somebody, then unlocked the doors of a gray-black Jeep with a remote starter, _beep beep_ , and shoved the box inside. There was nobody else in the car. No Jill. Chris’ fingers ran cold as if the blood had been stolen, left with only a hollow tingle where they touched the steering wheel. 

Oliveira paused, looked over his shoulder again. Slow, as if Chris had called his name, Oliveira turned, and stared straight at him. Oliveira shook his head, rubbed his eyes. 

Chris should have killed him when he had the chance. He’d known what the man intended, instincts had served him well, but for some ungodly reason 

_Jill_

had let him slip. Chris had been taught through experience, especially recent experience, that he always regretted being too merciful, but had never regretted when he’d been too cruel. This was a reminder, and Chris’ brain stopped just short of considering what had to be lost 

_Jill_

to remind him of a universal, objective fact: this was the way Umbrella operated. Any kindness was weakness, and given the chance, Umbrella found ways to turn your weakness into tragedy. There was money to be made from tragedy. 

And now here Oliveira was, collecting the evidence. _Her_ evidence. He was the last photo in a pile, all the rest broken in a hospital bed somewhere, gone or dead or arrested. He was the last. And he’d gotten what he wanted. Buzzer beater. Knew someone had smoked out his trail, so he’d hustled and closed shop, done what he’d come to do before any further warnings or their punishments could be issued.

Chris wouldn’t make the same mistake again. 

Oliveira waited for a passing car to clear the road, climbed into his driver’s seat with one hand on the roof, and fired up the Jeep’s engine into a purring rumble. Chris turned the key in the ignition of his truck, and didn’t stop to consider how quickly Jill was forgotten under the smell of a brewing chase — it was now Chris and Umbrella again, the hunter and the hunted, and the moon was bright and full. He followed. 

Chris kept two car’s lengths between them. He followed the Jeep in creeping time around corners, fell behind larger vehicles when they presented themselves. Oliveira didn’t look for a tail, and if he did, he was pretty fucking awful at avoiding them. They stopped at a red light, and Chris could see the shadow of Oliveira’s head leaned on a fist, propped against his driver’s side window. When the light turned green, the Jeep turned left onto an on-ramp to a section of mid-city highway. 

The red-and-blue strobe light atop the police car in Chris’ rear view mirror came sudden and jarring — couldn’t be for him. Not _now_.

The cruiser followed behind, didn’t switch lanes. 

“Fuck,” Chris spat, looked back and forth in a desperate man’s calculus between the frenetic spin of lights and the form of Oliveira’s jeep as it shrunk into the distance. At the last second he pulled over to the side of the road, turned into a gas station parking lot at a slow glide.

The officer was tall and severe-looking with dark hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, and she took her time on the walk to Chris’ driver’s side window. Chris watched with spiteful resignation as the Jeep disappeared into the night, and considered that if he drove off now, maybe he could still catch him. His hand itched to pull the gear shift back into first. It took every shred of self-control he contained.

God _damn_ it.

“Sir?” The officer asked. “You okay?” It was a question of concern but came out more like _we got a problem here?._

“Yes,” Chris said, “sorry. What seems to be the problem?”

The officer pointed at the back of his car. “Your tags are expired.”

“Right,” he said, “time got away from me this year. I’ll get them renewed.”

She wrote him a ticket on a pink pad, ripped it off and held it out to him. Her equipment jingled and clanked as she moved, and she eyed him with distrust. “They’ll throw this out once you pay them. Make sure you take care of it.”

“Thanks, officer.”

Chris waited until she pulled off and left. Her silver cruiser became smaller and smaller and then disappeared entirely. In a burst of fury, Chris punched his dashboard until one of his knuckles barked at him in sharp, desperate pain. Blood trickled down the black faux-leather material, dripped onto the cup holder below, into a silver ashtray filled with lonely tan-and-white filters, smoked down to their corpses. 

Then… he remembered.

Chris pressed against his fist with a wad of fast-food napkins and called Claire’s number again.

“Yes, big brother?” She asked, in an exasperated sing-song. A tiny voice on the other end of the line asked _Who is that?_ and Claire mumbled something with the receiver covered.

“You have the contact information for the survivors, right?”

“Mmmmyep,” Claire said, “I’m starting to think you don’t listen to me when I talk.”

“Give me Kevin’s. Kevin Ryman.”

Claire paused. “I think I’ve got it. Are you okay? You sound pissed.”

Chris took a breath. A broad, pale flap of skin had peeled off of his knuckle, opened like the mouth of a tin can, connected by a shred of skin. He ripped it off. “Just business,” he said, “I’ve got some stuff I need to ask him.”

“Hang on,” Claire said, and Chris could hear her as she typed, clicked on a computer. “Okay, here it is. You ready?”

“Shoot.”

Claire rattled it off. Chris read it back and she confirmed. “That’s what I’ve got,” she said, “a friend of yours?”

Kevin and Chris had never been friends. Not even close. Kevin was an idiot who shirked his work, and when he did it, did it lazy, made other people clean after him. He was the guy who you never knew how he kept his job, but keep it he did. Ryman’s work ethic wasn’t the issue here — Chris had seen him outside a few night’s past, where he stood outside of some honky-tonk piece of shit bar or another, talked with who looked like then turned out to actually _be_ Oliveira. Talked like they were friends, despite Kevin escaping Raccoon City himself. It didn’t surprise Chris that Kevin’s loyalty ran thin; you never really knew somebody. Never really knew what was going on in their head. Even the Nazis had Germans who helped them, fed other people around them to the alligators if they got the idea that the gator would eat them last.

“Yeah,” Chris said, his mind already far away. He watched the blood bubble and pool, and when it dripped between his fingers, he let it run. “A friend.”


	16. Bloodwork

May 15, 1999  
2:40 am

Jill fell into a sudden, all-encompassing sleep. A sleep that came on so hard and deep, she didn’t realize she’d even fallen asleep until she blinked awake in the middle of the night. The ever-present sounds of traffic and bustle were a distant murmur. The soft red light from the glowing numbers on Carlos’ bedside alarm clock played across the shadows, turning everything on her right side a gradient from fluorescent red to black. Jill turned her head to check the time. She couldn’t read those numbers, their shapes twisted into alien numerals which held no meaning to her brain, but she knew it was early morning. The fact she couldn’t read the numbers didn’t bother her — it was normal, maybe even fine.

It was warm in the bedroom: the early May heat seemed unsure whether or not it wanted to be humid as well. Carlos had fallen asleep on top of Jill, his arms wrapped around her, the side of his face nuzzled against the comfort of her chest. He was tactile and always reached for human touch, even in his sleep — searched for her with gentle gropes, pulled her against him. If she didn’t come to him, he would crowd up to her side of the bed until he found her warmth, tangle himself around it like a vine. Being physically desired so charmed Jill in a way that felt almost girlish in its distant embarrassment. She was still getting used to being on the receiving end of intimate human contact again after almost a half year of no touches outside of accidental brushes against strangers on the subway; where before there had been only trickles, now she was on the business end of a fire hose. When Carlos was around, there was never long between some sort of contact, as if he still tried to determine she was there, solid, from moment to moment. Feast or famine. 

Jill brushed her fingers through his hair, and he made a sound in his sleep, low and distant. It was a gesture that, at first, was tentative — afraid to wake him and be discovered. When he was asleep, she was less vulnerable, and was less hesitant to show affection so open. So, she waited until he slept to run her hands through his curls, feel their texture against and through her fingers, rough and soft at the same time, like cotton. When Jill's touch trailed away from him to smooth the darkness away from his forehead, look at his face, a coarse tumbleweed bramble remained tangled between and around her pale fingers, lifted soft out of his scalp. No resistance. Jill looked at her hand; her brain paused to make sense of what she saw, the handful she’d stolen. She looked back to him in panic, his new bald patch right on his hairline, impossible to hide. Carlos stirred as if alerted by violence against his pride and joy, and she could feel the flutter of his heavy eyelashes brush against her chest.

Jill started to say something to him about his hair — how she hadn’t meant to. Carlos lifted himself onto an elbow. A deep, wet, animal-shake of a growl emanated from his chest. 

“Carlos?” Jill asked, placed a hand against his face. Where before he was warm, the skin was now cold. In a split-second he turned against her, sunk teeth large and sharp and strong into the soft underside of her wrist, an entire mouthful of meat and vital, throbbing arteries. Jill screamed and struggled against him, tried to yank her arm away from his face; he made a muffled noise halfway between an scream and a rattlesnake’s dire shake of warning, shook his head like a pit bull as it worried a small animal in its powerful jaws. A sheaf of muscle tore free, wet and bloody; veins pulled, stretched, and snapped like strings of bubble gum. An artery, now a dark hole in Jill’s arm, still pumped with clueless urgency, sprayed blood into the air in arced metronome spurts. It didn’t hurt, not in her wrist. Somewhere in her chest. 

Jill held her wrist, tried to put pressure on it and scramble back away while he tore at the handful of flesh in his mouth. Her movement distracted him, and he looked at her with lolling eyes, distant and blind; their warm brown had split from the anchors, leaving milky blue-grey in a sea of blood red. A spill of fluid, cold and congealed like jelly, fell from his mouth and hit her bare chest (was she naked?), trickled between her breasts. She screamed again, thrust her hands against his face, pushed against him with all her might, muscles standing out under her skin like cables. He didn't budge, instead moved to her with dire inevitability. He was too heavy, his position too fortuitous. His hands, cold and spongy and strong, went to her face, grabbed it on both sides, and he screamed an animal hiss at her, sprayed her with blood and saliva and filth. Her own blood. He darted for the meat of her cheek, teeth bared.

A voice said something far away, but Jill couldn’t hear the words; her throat stung like broken glass with every breath but was overriden by the thump of her heart, and she couldn’t feel her hands. Hands grasped her face and she struck at the air, nerves and reflexes keyed and flailed in an attempt to save her life. Her elbow met soft resistance over a core of solidity and the voice cried out in surprise. When Jill realized what had happened, when no teeth sunk sharp into her skin and no weight pressed on her from above, when the world became the world again, her face grew blistering hot with panic, wonder, and dreamlike shame that floated somewhere in her head but refused to descend. 

“Jesus Christ, are you okay?” The voice asked. The genuine concern in it was heartbreaking, like she’d been pulled from a flaming car wreck and not awoken from a bad dream. Jill turned, sharper than she meant to, and missed butting her forehead against Carlos’. He adjusted himself, leaned on an elbow, one hand on her arm. His face was tilted in desperate worry; it struck at her like a hatchet.

“I—I—” Jill stammered, and couldn’t meet his eyes. It had been so long since she’d had one. She thought she was better. She’d thought a lot of things which were turning out to not be true. “I’m fine. I just have… nightmares, sometimes.”

“That’s one fuck of a nightmare,” he said. His hand left her arm and he worked his jaw, wiggled it back and forth. “ _Jesus_ , you hit like man.”

“I’m sorry.” Jill swallowed again. “I thought they were gone. Just a dream… I’m fine. Really.”

Carlos looked at his hand, checked for blood. “You’d tell me if you weren’t?”

Jill said nothing. In the throes where anxiety courted the shield of anger, her brain tensed for a fight. To shove at him and his concern, until it retracted from her sore spot, torn open and visible for all to see. Jill tried to organize her thoughts under the still-beating panic of her body. Carlos laid back against the pillow; his hand was on her back, ran between her shoulderblades. “C’mere,” he said. Jill lowered to where he lay, put her face on his chest with all the surety of a woman reaching her hand into a beehive.

“I get ‘em sometimes, too.” He said. His voice was almost impossible to hear with her head on his chest. The low sound bounced and reverberated inside the cavern under her ear. “From when I was a kid.”

It was a long time before she responded. “You just saying this to make me feel better about popping you in the mouth?”

“You’re in good company is all. I don’t think you’re…”

“…crazy?”

His turn to laugh. “Not in a bad way, anyway.”

Jill rolled her eyes. “Thanks.” 

After a moment, she felt the strange sense of a shift in his gaze. He’d craned his head down to look at her face.

“…You crying?”

Jill lifted her head; a sudden trickle of wetness, warm and tickling, ran from one of her nostrils. “No, I… _shit_.”

Jill stood and put a hand under her face, stumbled into the dim of the bathroom. She pulled a sheaf of toilet paper off the roll, blew her nose into it with a loud trumpet. She folded it over to use the other side, when it caught her eye — the paper was dark. She hit the light by the door.

The paper was bright red, enough to soak through the tissue and onto her hand, tiny black clots dotted the tissue like shakes of pepper. She looked into the mirror; it poured down her face, over her chin, between her lips like saltwater. Jill held her head over the sink and watched the droplets hit pink against the white porcelain, entranced. _Plink plink plink._ They soon became a gush, and Jill groped for the towel over the toilet, held it under her nose. Her stomach rolled in a wave of sudden sickness and panic. Desperate, she searched the angles of her face in the mirror; her eyes were still blue and her skin was still clear, fair, but she watched all the same, as if to will it to stay. To not fall away into dark, recessed caverns under her eyes.

After a few moments of silence, Carlos appeared in the doorway, maybe to talk more about what happened. Unlike dream-Carlos, he was without a shirt, dressed in a pair of thin grey jogging pants slung low over his hips. A trickle of her blood had fallen onto his chest and dripped down his stomach, into the dark trail of hair just above the waistband. “Are you — uh…”

“My nose is bleeding,” Jill said, muffled. _Muh noz if bleedung._

“What’d I tell you about gettin’ into fights in the house, lady?” Carlos said. It was a joke, as was his way, but his tone was soft, almost intimate. He put his fingers under her chin tilted her head up, pulled the towel away so he could see. His under-eyes were puffy and lined with pink, his dark hair mussed in a chaotic rat’s nest of sleep. “Jesus, it’s really goin’.”

“Dr. Behara said that if anything weird happened, I should go back. There were little clots in it...” _And I don’t think that dream was a coincidence._

Carlos let her trail off, looked at her with a mixture of sympathy and amusement. “Yeah, well, Dr. Behara’s a prick. Don’t jump from nosebleed to zombie, okay? Sure it’s just stress. You look perfectly fine to me. Here.” He pinched her nose between his forefinger and thumb, just under the bony protrusion at its tallest point. 

“Does this help?” Jill asked, deep and nasal. _Dus dis hep?_

“Who gets punched in the mush more often, you or me? Hold it there for about ten, you should be good. Don’t tilt your head back.”

“Okay. You’re right. I just need to go lie down, I think.” Her fingers tingled again, as if her hands had fallen asleep. “I’m really sorry. Is your face okay?”

“Nothin’ to be embarrassed about,” he said, and Jill could tell from the cadence of his breath that he wanted to add more, but didn’t. 

Carlos returned to the bedroom and, by the time Jill returned, was asleep. Though he was convinced of the two events being a coincidence, Jill’s brain, bathed in a stew of hormones, stress, panic, and fear, couldn’t separate them from one another. He had the privilege of space; the privilege of a mind that still worked in a way which allowed anxiety to be examined and discarded, not fixated upon. Jill didn’t. Not for a while. 

She looked at the blood in the sink and succumbed to an overwhelming roll of nausea. She gagged and coughed, vomited into the toilet. Dr. Behara might have been an asshole, but Jill was going to be in a Congressional hall with hundreds of people in a week’s time — she couldn’t leave anything to chance, slim as they were. Even if those chances were a simple function of an unwell mind.

Jill looked at her wrist — still intact, spidered with blue-purple veins. She swallowed and vomited again, and brought up nothing but bile.

***

May 14, 1999  
11:02 pm

  
Somewhere across the city, Kevin was taking a Break. He’d done jack shit all weekend since he’d gotten home from work on Friday, and it was looking like he’d be doing jack shit for the rest of the night, which was a good time by him. He was alone in his recliner, feet kicked up, drinking a beer and watching a re-run of X-Files, thankful to be off his sore, clicking knees. Kevin was 31, and it was a rough 31. He figured he could be allowed his aging, graceless as it was, considering he had survived this long despite all of the boneheaded situations he’d put himself in. Years of walking the beat in weighted gear and heavy boots had done a number on his joints. He was grateful these days to get a few hours on his ass. 

A knock on his door, firm and official, perked his attention. He sighed; he’d just gotten comfortable, settled into the warm sweet spot which was so hard to find and therefore move from, that Kevin considered not answering at all.

“I’m comin’, I’m comin’.” Kevin pushed his footrest down and climbed to a grunting stand — he’d started making what the guys at work had dubbed “dad noises” in the last year or so, grumbles of exertion when he climbed to or off his feet. Kevin put his hands against the painted wood of the door and squinted through the peep hole, a tiny glass lens which distorted figures on the other side like a funhouse fish-eye mirror. This distortion was why Kevin disbelieved the image on the other side, at first, and had to squint for a few more seconds to make sense of who he saw.

“Who is it?” Kevin called, through the door.

“It’s Chris,” said the voice. “Redfield. That you, Kevin?”

Kevin slid the chain across its metal railings, unlocked the deadbolt with a heavy clank, and opened the door. He looked confused, but smiled all the same, his heart surprised and glad.

“H-hey, man!” Kevin said, and extended a hand. When Chris took it, Kevin pulled their chests together, clapped Chris on the back. Chris was strangely stiff, like an alien seeing a human gesture for the first time, unsure how to react. “Hey, it’s good to see you!”

“Hey,” Chris said, with an uneasy laugh. “Good to see you safe.”

“So uh…” Kevin stammered, “come in, come in. You want a beer? Sorry the place is a wreck, been workin’ a lot lately.”

“It’s fine,” Chris said, turned his head to scan the apartment. “I’ll just have a water if you don’t mind.”

“Sure thing,” Kevin said. He opened his fridge and retrieved a plastic bottle. He took a glass that sat upside-down from a dishtowel beside the kitchen sink, poured the bottle into it, set it in front of Chris, then sat on one side of an island made of wood-printed plastic, his back to the kitchen. Chris accepted the glass as Kevin offered it and sat across from him. They chatted in brief, awkward stilts about what the other had been up to, how things had been. In Chris’ way, he was the first to break the seal on the actual reason for his visit.

“So… I’ll get right to it. I’ve got some questions I need answered. If you can help me, I’d be grateful.”

“Oh yeah? Well, if I’ve got answers, they’re good as yours.”

Chris looked at Kevin for a long moment before he spoke. Then, “Do you know a man named Carlos Oliveira?”

Kevin was stunned, frozen with his glass halfway to his lips. He wanted no part of this blooming shit show: he’d gotten the distinct impression Jill was Fucking Up with a capital F U, some time ago. That the honeymoon had ended between she and Chris and, for reasons unknown to Kevin, she’d felt around in their little merry band of survivors for some new thrills. Heavy, in his blissful consequence-free view of the world, had happily gone along with it. 

Kevin couldn’t blame Heavy, but he could pity him, because Heavy didn’t know Chris Redfield. Didn’t know his intense flashes of anger, didn’t know his tendency to knock people’s teeth out when he considered himself justified — punch first, ask questions later. And now Heavy was going to know him. Know him pretty well, if Chris’ tensed body language and darkened facial expressions were any indication. Kevin knew when a man wanted to kick someone’s ass, and this guy was like a spring-loaded ass-kicking machine, just waiting to be pointed at a target.

“I dunno, man,” Kevin said, part-sigh, and rubbed his hair, dark auburn peppered with more gray by the day. “I kinda don’t want to get in the middle of this.”

“So you do know him.”

“Yeah? We work together. I know him pretty good.” Kevin took a drink from his glass of beer, the swallow loud and uncomfortable. 

“Work where?”

“The FBC. We uh, go after the bioweapons and stuff. Both on the same team.”

Chris was silent.

“Look, dude, I’m not gonna bullshit you. I know you and Jill are… o-or _were_ … a thing. Okay? But — Hea… uh, Carlos… he’s my friend. I don’t really think I should…”

Chris’ smile dropped. His face was a chain-link fence that guarded something fully visible behind its security. “Your friend,” he said, “I’m hearing that a lot from people, lately. Seems like he’s gotten in pretty well with you guys.”

“I know his past, man. But he’s a survivor too, just like us—”

“He’s _not_ like us,” Chris cut him off, sharp and hard, “he’s Umbrella. Completely different.”

Kevin paused again, unsure. He couldn’t shake the feeling the whiff of violence he’d gotten had turned, slow and considering, in his direction. “He’s a good guy. Whatever you two have got going on — look, I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t want to know. But whatever it was it probably wasn’t his fault. He’s not that kind of guy.”

“Why don’t you tell me what kind of guy he is, then? Because I’ve gotten a pretty different impression.”

Kevin shrugged, like Chris had asked him an SAT question, looked around. “I dunno, man, I…” he sighed, “he’s loyal? Tries to look out for people? I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but… he and Jill got out together and… I guess he did some pretty rough shit to bring her with him. He treats her real good.”

“Loyal,” Chris repeated him.

  
***

_I guess he did some pretty rough shit to bring her with him,_ Chris’ mind repeated _, no way it’s rougher than what he did to her. Of course… she’s the ‘payday’. Of course he would._

“Glad you guys are buddies,” Chris said, “but I need to talk with him personally. Do you know where he is?”

Kevin fixed Chris with a look, open and the slightest touch sympathetic around its edges. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, man.”

Chris tilted his head. “I’m sorry?”

“Look — I know we weren’t buds or anything, back in the day. But I know you, and I know enough about you to know you wouldn’t be here unless you had a score to settle.” Kevin craned his head, lit a cigarette behind a palm cupped gold against the flame, “I don’t want any part of it.”

“This is important.”

Kevin said nothing and clinked his lighter closed with a metallic snap.

Chris’ tone was north of a growl, his patience worn into threads. “Not making a choice _is_ a choice, Ryman.”

Kevin met Chris’ eyes for a brief moment behind a tendril of smoke that twirled and danced, then averted his gaze. “I know.”

So there it was. An uncomfortable, tense silence hung in the air, dripped from its height, thick and viscous. Like blood. Kevin moved first, stood from his seat. “Look man, it’s late, and I gotta get to bed. Maybe you should…”

Chris’ eyes drifted over Kevin’s shoulder, back to the small kitchenette recessed into the far wall. A cast iron skillet hung from a hook over the sink, black and heavy as night.

“It’s my fault for not calling first,” Chris said, and stood from his chair, glass in hand. “Sorry if I was sort of intense… it’s been a long week.” He moved past Kevin and placed his glass in the sink. Kevin laughed, still uncomfortable, and said _yeah_.

The handle of the skillet called to Chris. It would be so easy to grab it, turn around and swing it, maybe break Kevin's shoulder out of its socket. It was a small weapon, not exactly heavy, but solid iron. He’d have to be careful not to swing at his head, but everywhere else might be fair game.

Time seemed to slow. Chris’ fingers twitched; he reached up. 

Chris stopped. He put his hand back down, forced it to be still, clenched it into a fist, then turned. Turned in time to see Kevin looking at him.

An explosion of sound — breaking glass — and the smell of bitter hops was everywhere. A sharp pain bit into the side of Chris’ head, knocked him sideways into the wall. When Chris looked up again, Kevin was four or five paces away, a pistol in his hands. 

“’Pride of the Force’ my ass.” Kevin said, no humor in his voice. “Gun on the ground. I know you have one.”

Though Chris’ anger was thick and heavy, the sight of Ryman with a gun in his hand was sobering for anybody that knew him; he was a surgeon. Chris wouldn’t be able to so much as get his out of his holster before he’d be on the ground with a cavern between his eyes. Blood trickled hot from Chris’ temple to the line of his jaw, tickled over the curves of his throat. He could feel shards and needles of glass in his short hair, against his skin.

“No need to do this,” Chris held his pistol up in surrender, knelt and placed it on the floor.

“Sure there is. God made man, but Sam Colt made ‘em equal. You can whoop my ass six ways from Sunday, but that’s not gonna matter with a bullet in your brain.” Kevin gestured with the barrel of his gun. “Back, against the counter.”

Chris took a slow retreating step towards the kitchenette. Broken glass crunched underfoot. “Kevin,” he said, “Think about what you’re doing.”

“Ryman, dipshit. Shared trauma don’t make us friends.” Kevin said. He kicked Chris’ pistol away. It spun somewhere across the carpet into the dark. “I saw you reach for it. I said get _back_.”

“Okay,” Chris said, and fell back another step. “See?”

“You want answers so fucking bad,” Kevin said, “now I want some. Why are you actually here? This ain’t just about him.” 

“It _is_ about him,” Chris said. The sharp throb against his head dissolved as his attention became distracted.

“Tch,” Kevin sucked his teeth. “All this, over some girl?”

“What?” Chris said, like Kevin had asked something so stupid Chris didn’t understand the question. “This is… no. It’s about _them_. Everyone is so sure that Umbrella is safe, but I’m not. I never will be. I’ve seen what they do, Ryman. This is _the playbook_.”

“Carlos _isn’t Umbrella_ , man,” Kevin protested, “What about what Irons did? He was our boss but we were fuckin’ clueless too. Carlos is just a guy who got caught in the same shit we did. Listen to yourself.”

“If he’s not Umbrella, _after working for Umbrella_ , then who the fuck is? Where does it stop?”

“You’ve lost your goddamned mind,” Kevin said, after a silent moment of disbelief. “You don’t even know him, man. This isn’t about him, this is about you, and your—”

“DON’T FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT LOSING YOUR MIND!” The roar of Chris’ sudden shout bounced off the walls. “ _This is what they do!!_ Why do you not see that?! I am the only one whose mind is still _working_ , god damn it! Irons! Wesker! The entire fucking city council! _All_ of them! They _all_ did this! And now one of them is here, infiltrating _again_ , gaining our trust _again_ , and I’m the ONLY one who sees what’s happening! Maybe you are comfortable with sacrificing the last of MY team, making everything we went through for nothing, but I’m _not_!” The ringing, high-pitched static that squealed and broke under its own volume began to blare, drowned out noise and sounds and sight alike. Chris’ teeth throbbed and ached from the pulse of it. Chris clutched his head. “God damn it!”

“None of that’s true, man,” Kevin said, and let his gun sink, pointing to the space between his feet. As tough, as sure of a shot as Kevin was — he was soft, touched easily by human pain. Pain like what he saw in front of him. “You need help. I’m not trying to be funny — this is some serious shit you’re carrying around.”

“And I’m the _only one_ carrying it,” Chris said, contemptuous and shaking, “everyone else was content to accept an apology that never fucking came, while the crater of my _god damned hometown_ was still smoking. I will never forget that, or them, no matter how they try to correct the record. _Never_.”

“I want to help you, man, but I don’t know how—”

All it took was a split second with his pistol disengaged and his eyes averted; one of the chairs in which they sat, pushed out from the island, flung through the air. Kevin raised his arms in time to shield his face; the wood smashed in cruel, hard lines across the bones of his wrists, staggered him back a step. Chris was upon him, like a charging train. They tumbled to the floor under Chris’ weight, Kevin’s gun lost somewhere in the rush. Kevin was a strong man, solid and physically capable, but was soundly outmatched; it was all Kevin could do to raise his arms to guard himself, his face, but under enough force, enough times, even those failed.

The heat was impossible to stop once it started to churn. That train barreled along tracks unending, tracks which lead nowhere as it fed on itself. It wasn’t Kevin that Chris saw underneath him after enough blows, nor even a human form — it was Umbrella. The weakness, the complacency, the willful ignorance from those who _could_ stand against Umbrella — but just chose not to. That made Umbrella possible. For every Oliveira, there were thousands of Rymans; so content with their comfort, their money, their power, their “safety”. 

When Chris had arrived, he wanted answers. Now, he didn’t remember what the questions were.


	17. Missing

There was another hole in the hangar this morning. It sucked in Carlos’ attention like the brim of light around a black hole, made it difficult to focus on the task in front of him. Carlos’ eyes kept drifting to the empty spot where Kevin would normally sit. The handset of a black cordless phone sat, silent and still, on its base across the room. 

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Kennedy said as Carlos looked at the empty bench for about the twentieth time since 9am. “He’s probably just hungover and over slept. We’ve all done it.”

“Probably right,” Carlos said, unconvinced. “Just feels weird. He’s never no-call-no-showed before.”

“Keep in mind who you’re talkin’ about,” one of the other men said, to a smatter of mumbled approval and laughter, “he could be halfway to Tijuana with a lampshade on his head as we speak.”

“Yeah,” Carlos said, and fought to keep his eyes away from the spot beside him. “Probably fine.”

***

  
The morning passed slow and quiet as a sleeping heartbeat. Somewhere before lunch, a powerful head of black thunderclouds rolled over the sun. A noisy torrent of heavy rain shot through with thunderclaps shook and rattled the windows, and a small, rippled pool of water crept under the bay door. As they broke for their hour lunch, Carlos stood from the table. He was mid-stretch, trying to pop his aching lower back, when Kennedy looked up at him.

“You’re not going out in that?” 

“What, you afraid of a little rain? It’ll be fine. I got an errand to run.”

Carlos didn’t wear a jacket that day — by the time he reached his car, his black fatigues clung to him, cold and soaked. He tried his best to smooth his hair out of his face, with the full knowledge it was a fool’s errand; his hair was its own beast, only went where it wanted to go, when it wanted to go there. Once he was tired of fighting with it, he turned his key in the ignition and started at a brisk thirty-five miles an hour through the nearly zero visibility for Kevin’s apartment, somewhere on the border where the lights and bustle of Downtown D.C. proper met the West End. It wasn’t a great area of town, but their apartment stipend didn't stretch far, not in the glittering rot of D.C.; it barely paid the rent and utilities on Carlos’ own one-bedroom apartment in Nowheresville. When he reached Kevin’s place, Carlos mounted the narrow climbing stairway shellacked in thick, shiny layers of brown and pale yellow paint. The place looked like it had been repurposed out of a funeral home, or maybe a church, and it smelled strongly of Indian food. Nobody looked at him as he passed, nobody even smiled, all averted eyes and bowed heads. They definitely didn’t ask questions, which Carlos assumed was just as well. 

When he reached the door marked 122C, Carlos raised a fist to knock. As his knuckles met the wood, the door moved to and fro by the barest of touches, like a weather vane that twitched in a weak wind. The door was ajar, a tiny strip of light cracked between the plank and its frame. Training took over, guided his movements into practiced, exact gestures; Carlos turned his body and touched his shoulderblades to the rough paint of the wall beside the door’s hinges, unholstered the pistol hidden under his shirt at his lower back, and pushed the door open with slow apprehension, one large hand flat on the rough, painted wood. It moved in an easy arc that creaked, as if to apologize for the mess within its boundary.

Multiple details jumped out for Carlos’ attention at once, overwhelmed his logical faculties. There was blood everywhere and the room smelled, faint, like pennies; a large, brackish pool of it had soaked into an almost circular stain dead-center of the tan, hard-packed carpet. As he approached, Carlos saw whips and ribbons of it slashed out in near-horizontal angles from the main pool, as if someone had thrown it from a brush across a canvas. A weak, incongruous streak of it snailed into a doorway to the left, over angles of broken glass that glittered against the overhead light of the kitchen. Rain beat in through the kitchen window, covered the sink, the counter, the dishes and some of the floor with a pool of ice-cold rainwater. The white linen curtains flapped at Carlos as if to say _Here, here! This way, my good man!._

“Kevin?” Carlos called, his voice suspicious, “You here?”

The bathroom door burst open with a clatter, as if butted with a shoulder from the inside. Carlos fell back a step, pointed his pistol at his assailant; a woman, tall and blonde and dressed in a sheer black turtleneck shirt over a dark camisole. Her business skirt and heels said “court appearance” more than they said “crime scene”. She and Carlos had the same idea, aiming guns at one another in perfect mirror-reflection synchronization as the curtains flapped and danced. She took one look at Carlos’ pistol and gave him a look of distaste. No fear. “Put that away, Rambo, and I won’t blow your head off. Exactly who the hell are you?”

Carlos recoiled. “Maybe you should start by introducin’ yourself before you start barkin’ orders, huh lady? I’m from the FBC. Put it down.”

“You’re the stranger here,” she continued, unflapped, “so I’ll bark as many orders as I damn well please, asshole.”

From the bathroom, a voice fluttered, weak and croaking: “Heavy? S’that you?”

The woman glanced back over her shoulder, as if a valuable, protected secret had just been given up to an enemy.

“Yeah,” Carlos called back, “it’s me. You wanna call off your pitbull out here so I can open the gate?”

“Alyssa,” Kevin said, under a pant of what sounded like exhaustion, “he’s fine.”

The woman put her gun away, with a motion of reluctance. “Introduce yourself next time.”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to.” Carlos wove around her, over the crunch of broken glass, into the bathroom beyond. Kevin lay in his bathtub, jets of water from a shower-head beat on him and his clothes clung to his body, dark and creased and soaked. He was breathing hard, his face bruised and slashed open and swollen. One of his eyes was blacked so severely that the skin was shining, threatening to split, the side of his face swollen out in lumps like an allergic reaction. Carlos holstered his weapon and ran to kneel at his side.

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” Carlos said, “what the hell happened?!”

“What’s it look like? I got my ass beat,” Kevin croaked, and craned his head, weak. 

“I’m gonna call you an ambulance,” Carlos said, and Kevin’s hand fell on his, wet and pink with blood. “Just hang in there, okay?”

“I’ve already tried that,” Alyssa said, “he won’t go. And I can’t move him.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me.” Carlos said, turned back to Kevin in disbelief. “You could be really hurt. You gotta—”

“No,” Kevin said, “no. I’m good. I just need…” he took a deep breath in, “I just need help gettin’ in bed.”

From behind them, Alyssa heaved a testy sigh.

“But—” Carlos started.

“No,” Kevin insisted, his voice a firmness Carlos wasn’t used to. “I go to the hospital, they call the cops, I gotta give a statement. I’m not gonna… no. Just help me up.”

Carlos took both of Kevin’s hands and pulled him to a stand. Kevin’s legs shook and threatened to give out; Carlos caught him, then scooped him up, popped him into the air to get a better grip, like a groom carrying his bride over the threshold. Kevin leaned his head against Carlos’ chest, sopping wet, and put his hand against him. 

Then, he sang: _“Did you ever know that you’re my heeerooo…”_

Carlos shook his head as he carried him to the bed in the living room. Alyssa followed after, her footsteps quiet, catlike. “Good to see they couldn’t beat the annoying out of you.” She said.

Kevin laughed, then coughed, deep and wet. From this angle, three of his teeth were missing from the right side of his mouth. “You ain’t gettin’ off that easy. I’m gonna be around to annoy both your asses for a long, long time.”

Carlos sat him down and Alyssa imposed herself to help Kevin change into a dry, clean outfit. Kevin made some sort of joke at her, under his breath, that Carlos couldn’t hear. She looked like she was ready to slap Kevin, but in the end just shook her head while she worked, her fire suddenly low and smoldering like the dial on a gas stove had been turned to a simmer rather than a flame.

“You’re such an idiot,” was all she said. It sounded less like an accusation and more like sympathy. With the realization this hard, smartly dressed woman was who Kevin called first, before any of the guys at the office — maybe it even sounded like love, the kind of love that was less like flowers and candy and more like beating someone’s ass for your honor, even if it was your own. 

With one more solid heave of dead body weight, Carlos laid Kevin down, centered on his mattress. “God, that feels so much better,” Kevin sighed, “thanks, you two.”

Carlos stood back, one hand on his hip, and glanced back and forth between them. “Either of you gonna tell me what happened?”

Alyssa tilted her head, arms crossed, and looked at Kevin in pointed accusation. “Good question.”

Kevin turned his head to look at Carlos with his good eye. “I don’t wanna get him in trouble,” he said, “he’s…”

“This was someone you _knew_?” Alyssa bristled in disbelief.

Kevin nodded, held up a hand as if to say wait just a minute. “He’s not like this. I think something happened to make him… he’s sick, man. He needs help, not the cops.”

Carlos laughed, humorless. “Looks a fuck of a lot like he is like this, man.” 

“You’re friend’s smarter than you are,” Alyssa said to Kevin. “You’re being stupid.”

“Maybe,” Kevin said, and squinted in pain as he tried to get comfortable. “But I can’t.”

Alyssa looked at Carlos with a breed of contempt, and gestured to Kevin as if to say _after you_. “I’m going to go have a smoke if you’d like to take point for a while, so I don’t strangle him.”

“I dunno, sounds kind of hot!” Kevin called after her.

“Shut up.” The door clapped shut, and she was gone.

“She’s, uh…” Carlos said, as he carried a chair from the kitchenette to Kevin’s bedside. He dragged it with one hand between his legs, on the lip of the seat, as close as it would sit to his bed. “She’s intense. Your friend? From the TV, right?”

“Don’t let her bark fool you, she’s a softie. She’s just all keyed up, from… the… all the _this_. You know.”

They sat in uncomfortable silence. “Who did this?” Carlos asked. “Just tell me. I won’t call the cops.”

Kevin thought about it, then pointed to the kitchen island beyond. “Get me a smoke and I’ll see if it jogs my memory.”

“Those things’ll kill you,” Carlos said, joking, and brought back the pack of Lucky Strikes, Kevin’s copper Zippo lighter, and an ashtray.

“Ha ha,” Kevin said, unamused. Carlos lit one for him and Kevin took a long, reverent drag, before speaking again. “His name’s Chris. Chris Redfield. He was a member of STARS, but he’s gone off the deep end, man. He thinks…” Kevin winced, “he tried to get information out of me about where you were. I’m not trying to start shit, just… be prepared, okay?”

Carlos struggled to remember the photo from the office. Which one of those smiling, proud faces belonged to someone who could do this? 

“About me?” Carlos asked, confused. “You could’ve told him where to find me.” In fact, after looking at the flowering bruises and grotesque swelling over Kevin’s eye, Carlos wished Kevin had told him. Wished very dearly he had. An image fluttered into Carlos’ mind, hard looks and short brown hair and thrusting knees into soft stomachs.

“Nope,” Kevin said, “but… it appears that people who don’t snitch also get stitches. So I can’t win.”

Silence fell between them. “Jill’s gonna be real upset,” Kevin said, “they were like…” he wound two of his fingers together to symbolize closeness. “He didn’t used to be like this.”

Carlos had heard enough. He set his mouth in a line and stood up. “Do you know where he is?”

Kevin shook his head. “He didn’t say — you have to be careful. He’s… he’s dangerous. He’s not right in the head. He’s—” Kevin sighed, and his expression — pain, open concern — gave Carlos pause.

“What, man?” Carlos asked, softer than he intended.

“Just tired of it. Tired of blood. Tired of people gettin’ hurt. Tired of Umbrella.”

Kevin had never said anything Carlos had identified with so strongly in all his life. The door opened again and Alyssa entered, closed it behind her with a quiet click.

“Can I speak to you outside?” Alyssa asked Carlos. It was less of a question and more of a statement: _I need to speak to you. Now. Out here._

“Uh… sure,” Carlos said, struck with sudden discomfort at the idea of being alone with her, like he’d cut himself on her edges. “I gotta get back, man. Call me if you need anything, okay?” Carlos extended a hand for a shake and Kevin took it. When Carlos moved to back away, Kevin pulled on his hand to bring him closer.

“Thanks for coming over,” Kevin said. It was a simple statement that carried a few others in its arms, unsaid but understood. “I really mean it.”

“Course,” Carlos said, “you know I’ve got you.”

Kevin squeezed his hand and then let it go, turned aside and closed his eyes to finish his cigarette in peace. Carlos followed Alyssa into the hallway — she lead him far away from Kevin’s door, down the hallways that smelled of spices and paint and rain.

“I heard him,” Alyssa said, “Chris Redfield, he said.”

Carlos nodded. Of course she was the type to ear hustle outside doors. “That’s the name he mentioned.”

Alyssa rooted around inside her purse, and retrieved a small, black, electronic device. She clicked its controls, as if looking for something specific, then turned it to Carlos. The face of the man from the other night after the bar stared back at him — the hard furrow of his eyebrows, the craggy lines of displeasure, the early formation of brackets around his mouth. Realization dawned like a sinking stone, and Carlos’ eyes narrowed.

“This prick,” he said.

“Guessing you know him, too.”

Carlos didn’t, not personally. But he was going to, very soon.

“These fucking cops think they own the goddamned world, these days,” she mumbled, around her unlit cigarette. “I offered to interview him for my piece but he declined with no comment. I know where he’s staying, at least as of a few months ago. It’s a start. Do you have a pen?”

“Why’re you giving me this?”

“You said Kevin could’ve told him where to find you, so, I’m just doing the legwork. If you tell him I gave this to you, I’ll call you a liar and throw you under every bus in this God forsaken city on the spot. And he _will_ believe me over you, so don’t get cute.” Carlos grasped the paper, and when he went to pull on it, Alyssa tugged it back to bring him close. “Whatever you’re planning, and I hope it’s what I think you’re planning… give him one for me, too. Or five.”

This woman was 100% out of Kevin’s league, as far as Carlos believed in leagues, anyway; he’d seen some massively ugly fuckers pull some incredibly attractive women over the years, but they were usually anomalies, doomed to failure. Charm and wit and humor could get you far, but they only opened the door. Kevin was a good guy, true and funny and kind, not bad-looking. From the looks of Alyssa in her tailored designer clothes and perfect makeup and carefully cultivated body, he’d have precisely nothing a woman like this would want or couldn’t get at a higher price somewhere else. And, given her recent success and no-nonsense personality, at the very least, Kevin was punching a few classes above his weight. A few very steep ones.

“Y’know…” Carlos said, and gestured to her with the paper, “tell me to butt out if its none of my business, but if you’re into the guy, maybe just tell him rather than sending goons like me to rough up his enemies.”

“What can I say,” Alyssa said, “I show affection through acts of service. Now butt out and let me handle our resident punching bag while you go turn Walker, Texas Ranger there into one.”

***

  
Jill called the office and told them she’d been having symptoms, symptoms she’d recognized as what she’d gone through in The City, and they were getting worse. Nosebleeds. Throwing up foam, a new thing. Tingling hands and feet. 

The nurse paused. “You’re sure it’s foam and not just bile? Any blood?”

Jill didn’t know the difference. “Sometimes,” she said, “more and more as time goes on.”

“Increased hunger for protein?”

“No,” Jill said, “not yet.”

“I’m going to put you on hold and ask the doctor, okay? Just try to stay calm. I’ll be back.” The nurse returned after some minutes. The note of concern in her voice was difficult to ignore. “Dr. Behara wants you in this afternoon. We’ll send a car to get you. Don’t walk, don’t take public transportation, and please don’t take a cab. We want to keep this thing contained.”

 _Don’t answer knocks on your door unless advised by authorities,_ Jill remembered.

“Okay. I can do that.”

A black Sedan with the logo of FEDERAL USE ONLY on the side stopped outside the apartment steps about three hours later, and whisked Jill, wordless, into the rain. When she arrived, two men in those same blue plastic suits from the forest in October greeted her at the car, passed her a clipboard and pen to fill out a form with. They escorted her through a stark white negative-pressure corridor, sat her down and drew so many phials of blood she was lightheaded — took a saliva swab, made her pee in a cup. Then she was alone, waiting in her gown against the white room, nibbling on cookies and drinking a Gatorade, her legs once again dangling off the side of the bed.

Doctor Behara entered the room, quiet as a spirit. Then, “How are you feeling today?”

“Like shit,” Jill said, the taste of the Gatorade ringing chemical and overly sweet in her mouth. “…scared.”

The doctor nodded. “Understandable, but please try to not become stressed. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, come to think of it,” he said, and settled down, wide-legged onto a stool. “Thank you for coming in, and being responsible about your recovery. Have your nosebleeds been your only symptom?”

“No. But it feels very similar. I’m sore, especially in my hands and my feet. Headaches. The nosebleeds. It’s like I can’t shake whatever it is I got.” She swallowed, a click. “I thought it might be an extended incubation period. I felt like this last year in July, but then it went away.”

“So," he released a breath, not quite a sigh, but resigned, "we need to discuss your test results. I’m afraid this is serious, and now we’re in uncharted territory.”

Jill’s guts clenched up. Her hands tingled, like the blood had been stolen.

“Your antibodies and titer are fine — unless there’s some other sort of lingering side effect we’ve yet to discover. But… you are five weeks pregnant. Perhaps six. And given what we know…” the rest of his sentence petered out into the air, under a ringing, a rushing of blood. Her eyes focused on the cap of the pen in his breast pocket; blue, like a jay, gleaming in the light.

Five weeks. April, maybe late March. Five. One, two, three, four, fi— 

“Miss Valentine?”

Jill looked up at him. “Huh?”

The doctor watched her, attentive and expectant, like he was waiting for a response to something. “Have you been smoking, drinking, taking any sort of illicit drugs?”

“No… I… no. No, none of that… I drink beer sometimes, but…” everything was changing — no, crumbling. Creeping fear gripped her in cold, uncaring hands. Her joints were filled with water. She looked around for a place to put down the drink and the cookies before they dropped out of her hands.

“So we’ll have to stop that immediately. And…” 

Jill heard nothing else, lost under the push and rush of pressure in her head. She started to feel sick. He talked, talked and talked and talked under the thrumming.

Something in the back of Jill’s mind thrust to the fore, as if pulled by a rope through the fog of thoughts that rambled and looped in her brain. “I need to help,” Jill blurted out. “The FBC.”

Dr. Behara blinked at her. Jill was distantly aware she’d interrupted his sentence, but didn’t much care — didn’t have the mental focus to care. 

“But…” the doctor said, stunned, then regrouped into his calm voice, the kind used to soothe, inform, redirect. “Miss Valentine. Your intentions are valiant, of course, but your condition… _conditions_ … and the added stress—”

“You said before, you need me. You needed me so much that you kept me sedated. Took away my agency. Nothing has changed. Not for me. I’m still Jill Valentine, and I’m still your best bet. Intelligence, _something_. There has to be some way you can use me.” 

“But you are testifying—”

“It’s _not enough._ I can’t be idle. Passive. There has to be something. Don’t tell me there’s not.”

Dr. Behara sat back, and took a few moments before he spoke again. “Are you absolutely certain this is what you want to do?”

Jill nodded. Now, more than ever. “I have to.”

Dr. Behara evaluated her, not without sympathy. 

“Not to belabor the point, but I cannot clear you for field work. But… perhaps…” he rubbed his face, and his eyes -- so dark they were black -- flickered over her. "Perhaps I can speak to someone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (( EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT
> 
> #1! Here's next week's chapter early, since I'll be moving house. So much fun. If I get a chance to work ahead I may still drop some on time, but no promises. 
> 
> #2 I struggled so hard with this chapter. Not because of issues writing but because of pulling the trigger on a big twist, lol. It's uncharted territory for me and I wasn't sure what direction I wanted to go with it but one of my big complaints about Jill's story arc in the RE franchise is how she disappears after RE3 and then doesn't pop up again for years. Carlos also disappears. What could have possibly happened to keep her out of field work...? Pregnancy is sort of a worn trope in regards to female protagonists, but I'm determined to do right by my favorite heroine while still making it make sense.
> 
> #3 I'm overwhelmed with how much love and attention and sweet comments this story is getting. I love this community and you guys are so awesome. <3 <3 <3 ))


	18. The Nearness of You

They offered Jill a car to take her home. Jill declined and told the nurse she’d walk — she wasn’t sure how far away from Carlos’ apartment the clinic was, but like an injured animal, she needed to escape into solitude. To nest in her own brain. To think. 

Jill walked with the rain drumming on her nylon umbrella, so lost in her own thoughts that she overshot the apartment by about half a mile when she’d come back to Earth. When Jill opened the door of the unit to dim emptiness, still and silent, she was relieved. She wasn’t ready to talk, to pretend that things hadn’t changed. Not quite yet.

Jill took a shower. The lizard portion of her brain started to pull away, dragged everything soft and understood between she and Carlos from their anchors. Packed it up to move. Jill considered it independence, considered it hardness, not the preemptive preparation for abandonment it actually was. She had been left by everyone — some of their own power, but most not — and was starting to become comfortable alone. Her natural state, perhaps, free of the vulnerability that close relationships had brought her. Carlos had come along and shaken that up, of course, in his merry, lighthearted way. A counterbalance to her own hard seriousness. However serious Jill was, she was also practical: merry, lighthearted men did not become that way by courting things that nailed them down. In her mind, there was now an expiration date, and while she’d be sorely hurt to see him go, she attempted to adjust her expectations and her wants accordingly. To give it an honorable death, at least.

 _What did you expect?_ She thought, _Silly._ _Most guys can’t pull a pizza out of the oven without it burning. What made you think…_

Of course, men had such sweet, convincing ways of talking about these things. It had only happened once or twice, but once or twice was enough. In her twenty-six years, Jill hadn’t ever been so cavalier or careless. Always insisted on protecting herself. It only took once, once of someone charming and sweet assuring you in just the right combination. A tale countless women told, and now, she was one of the many.

Because Jill was practical, she didn’t dither overlong on shame or regret, but rather focused on what needed doing to reel her mind back from its pinwheels. She needed… vitamins, that was right. She needed to work on bringing her stress down. She also needed to consider the call that would be coming from the FBC, _if_ one was coming. Preparing for that. Preparing for the trial.

Reduce your stress, they said. Like it was that easy.

Jill stepped out of the shower, and while she dried herself with a towel, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. No blood, not this time. With a slow, considering wonder, she turned to her side, and looked at her belly in the mirror, ran her hand down it. Still flat, little dips of muscle on either side of a healthy pocket of feminine fat low on her abdomen that she’d never been able to lose, no matter how many miles she’d run or how coyly her abs had peeked at her from under her ribcage. 

A wave of fatigue like a cresting beachhead washed over her, carried her nearly off of her feet. The walk was long and chilly, and it had been a brutal day otherwise, her mind burning what energy her body didn’t in its spinning and considering. Jill yawned, rubbed her eyes, streaked her forgotten makeup like faint gray war paint. She dragged herself to the bedroom and used the remnant tatters of her energy to dress, crawled atop the mattress and slept where she landed, snoring and drooling, until Carlos returned home later that night.

***

  
Swishes and burbles of falling rain, angular tinkles as it hit off of drainpipes and cars. Carlos sat in his Jeep, considering, looking at the piece of paper in his hand while the water drove off his windshield. 

Kevin had said that Jill and Chris were close. Carlos trusted Jill almost more than he trusted himself, sometimes; her keen insights and judge of character cut to the core of most people. Jill would know whether or not this guy was crazy or just having a rough time. Kevin’s face, bubbled out and bloodied, the feel of fists on the soft part of Carlos’ belly… both were too close to Carlos’ heart to make a judgment unclouded. But Jill… he could talk to her and she would kick him the raw deal. She would tell him the truth. 

Carlos wanted revenge, but not so badly that he’d justify extracting it from someone who was unwell. That sort of victory wasn’t a victory at all; that was the kind of thing assholes did, the ones who needed violence to say things about themselves things they couldn’t get other places. So Carlos would let Jill tell him what was up before he made any decisions. He would let her direct his fists. If this guy really deserved to get his ass beat, Jill would encourage it. She would be his weather vane.

When Carlos returned to the apartment, wet and cold and tired, the first thing he did was stop to kneel beside the bed and give Jill a wordless kiss on the head. Always a delicate sleeper, she leaned into it and made a happy, half-conscious noise. 

“How you feeling?” He asked. It was like a switch was flipped; once she awoke completely, blinked up into his face, her smile faded and she crawled away from him. She sat up, rubbed at her eyes. It was an unexpectedly childlike gesture, like you’d see on a five-year-old denying a nap. _I’m not tired. Really. I don’t need to sleep._ Something made him reach out, run his hand along her shoulder.

“I’m okay,” she said, “Just tired. You know.”

“Sure?” Carlos laughed, watching her, her uncomfortable body language. He stood to a low stoop and fell onto the bed beside her, its springs creaking in protest under his weight. “You look like something’s buggin’ you. Have another bad dream?”

Jill shook her head. Carlos didn’t believe her, but he knew better than to push when Jill didn’t want to be pushed. “So — I got a problem you might be able to help me with. Related to this whole Umbrella-Raccoon City trial thing.”

It sharpened her up. Suddenly her attention was fully his. “What kind of problem?”

“You know a guy named Chris Redfield? They said he was STARS, back in the day.”

Even under the darkness, the color drained from Jill’s face. She didn’t respond for a long, long time, almost like Carlos had brought up a name she didn’t think he’d know. It was a pause of being caught, of not being sure how much you should tell. 

“I know him,” Jill said, unsure, “why? What’s going on? Is he okay?”

 _For now,_ Carlos thought, but didn’t say. “Well, tell me about him. Would you say he’s a good guy?”

“Of course. He was one of my teammates. He was a— _is a_ great person.”

“Was?”

“We had a falling out. Why, what’s this about? Did he get a hold of you?”

“Guess you could say that. You remember the other night, when you put the, uh, broccoli on my stomach?”

Realization dawned on Jill’s face, a slow creep that dragged her sharp, beautiful features down into an expression of horror. Her eyes were panicked. “How do you know it was him?”

“Kevin,” Carlos said, “Chris paid him a visit, too. Trying to find me, he said.”

Jill blinked. “Okay… wait, a visit, or…”

Carlos raised an eyebrow. “A _visit._ ”

“Oh, my God. Is he okay?”

“Kevin? He’s good. Missing a few teeth, but he’s his usual self. His lady is over there takin’ care of him. Look… Kevin said you guys were close, before, and he’s said some stuff that makes me think that Chris thinks he’s doin’ the right thing. Tryin’ to protect you, maybe. But — he’s gonna kill someone. Kevin didn’t want me to call the cops. He said he’s sick, like in the head.”

“I knew he didn’t trust you,” she said, “you’re what we had the falling out over.”

Carlos laughed again. “Over little ol’ me? And his ego grew three sizes that day.”

Jill looked at him, pleading, as if imploring him to be serious. “ _Carlos…_ ”

“So, I need you to tell me if this is the kind of person he is, or if he needs a different kind of help. Whatever ends up happenin’, you’re the one who knows him, Jill. You call the shots here.”

“Chris was… hot-tempered, sure,” Jill said, “but he’d never hurt someone like Kevin. Never. He’s sure it was Chris?”

“Hundred percent.” Jill made to reply but faltered, and Carlos sat back and looked at her; her bearing was no longer proud, but flinching and unsure. “You sure you’re okay? You’re kind of freakin’ me out.”

“No,” Jill said; she sighed and all the tension in her shoulders sunk with it, like a deflating balloon. “Not really.”

“Aw, come on. At least tell me. Did I do something?”

Jill looked him straight in the eye, with some difficulty. “…I saw Doctor Behara.” 

Carlos rubbed his forehead. “Okay,” it was his turn to sigh, and he tried not to let his distaste seep through and color his words. Part of it was frustration; once Jill fixed her brain on something, she never let it go until it was wholly disproven, no matter how far-fetched it was. None of his words ended up mattering in the face of her mind’s bulldog jaws, which he supposed he should have expected. “Can’t spare either of my arms, but I might have a leg I can part with if you just nibble. And if you promise to help me up the stairs.”

“Don’t,” Jill warned, too weak to carry any real authority. “This is serious.”

“Wait. You’re not… sick. Right? You’re okay, right?”

“I’m okay,” she said, “but…”

Of course she was. “But…” he repeated.

Jill didn’t respond. 

“Look...” Carlos started, “You got a problem.” He was tired — tired from work, tired from rolling over Kevin’s situation, just tired in general. Now this… “And I gotta say, the cold shoulder’s not helpin’, so—”

Jill blurted the words, and there was silence. No reaction. No change in facial expression. No anger, no shock. He just looked at her, unsure he’d heard her correctly.

“You serious?” He asked, the lightness and good nature swooped out of his bearing. 

“As a heart attack,” she said, unhappily.

Kevin, the FBC, Chris, all of it, even the room in which they sat, ceased to exist. Carlos’ brain retracted into itself to a place of stunned silence where nothing permeated, in or out.

“Uh…” was all he said. And then: “Wait, _what_?”

The silence buzzed and filled every corner of the room, every crack. “Are you… are you gonna…” he asked.

Jill screwed her mouth into a line, as if tasting something bitter; she shook her head, and a pit of dread opened in his stomach. The future just beyond the horizon, the carefree nature of his life, the unimpeded freedom, all tumbled into that pit in his belly, and he felt sick. He could feel his heart, slamming against the wall of his chest as if for his attention.

_Fuck._

“I thought about it. There’s been enough of not having a chance. Of someone else deciding it was your time to go, before…” she stopped, “there’s been too much of it. I can’t.”

Carlos scanned the windowsill, for want of something to look at. It was a long time before he blinked again.

“I’m sorry,” Jill offered. “I know this isn’t what you wanted.”

Carlos didn’t fight her on that. 

“And I know neither of us are ready, and it’s hard to think of a worse possible time.” Jill continued, in a hurried tumble, after seeing his reaction, “I don’t want money. I won’t bother you. I don’t want you to feel forced into being okay with it if you’re not. But I just can’t.”

“I’m not the guy you want, Jill. I’m not gonna be any good at this. I’ve never even thought about it.” Carlos looked at his hands. It was impossible to imagine those same hands cradling something tiny and fragile, not taking a life, but encouraging it to grow. He couldn’t imagine holding a child and not hurting it, dropping it… something. Who was he to be charged with that, as he was? What kind of sick joke would put a defenseless little thing in those hands and expect them to do anything but fuck it up? What did those hands have to offer a kid? 

And even if he didn’t hurt it — would he just leave one day and get blasted apart by some land mine in some stupid unwinnable war between rich people, like his father? Leave Jill to explain that sometimes daddies had to go fight bad guys and didn’t come home and there was no other reason? 

Those hands were shaking, and he balled them into fists against his knees to still them. Suddenly so many things that he’d wanted from their relationship were _now_ , do it _now_ , plucked out of some nebulous future and slammed down in front of him like a cement barricade, blocking out all his other options, options he didn’t want, didn’t even think of, but he still mourned the death of all the same now that they were taken away. Maybe he’d be happy if this had happened in a few years, when he’d had time to become a better person. When his paychecks didn’t depend on killing, on blasting things apart. When he’d had time to become someone other than he was now. Somebody more worthy of it. Somebody who hadn’t started this conversation determining whether or not to smash his knuckles into someone’s face.

He took a deep breath and turned to look at her. 

“You gotta make whatever choice is best for you. I’ll back you on it, whatever you choose. If that means learning to be okay with it, then…” he trailed off, “but I don’t want you to leave.”

Jill’s face was sad. “This changes everything. It’s all going to be different.” 

“If it’s gotta change, but that means you’re still here… that’s fine by me. I’ll change it. Just…” his shoulders were slumped, tired, in what looked like defeat. “Gimme some time, is all.” 

Jill crowded up close to him. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

“For what?”

“For not having more faith in you,” she said. Somewhere in the end of her sentence, something clotted, wet in her throat, and her blinks became rapid. Carlos had never seen her cry; whether a function of genuine emotion, raging hormones, or somewhere between the two, it was soft and quiet but still shocked him and sent him defensive, like being on the business end of a gun. He had been so fixated on his own life, how much it would change and what he’d be denied, that he’d neglected to consider hers, one of her constants now kicked out from underneath her. How afraid she must have been. “For getting you caught up in all this. I just…”

“Hey, hey, easy now,” he said, and gathered her close. “Don’t, uh…” What was it they always said to pregnant ladies? “Don’t stress yourself out, okay?” He rubbed a hand across her back, and hoped it was enough, felt dumb and powerless all at the same time. When she rested on him he felt relieved, like he’d guessed correctly at the solution to a particularly heinous math problem. “I seem to remember getting… uh… caught up all by myself. You helped, but…”

“Can you stay here with me tonight?” She asked, “Does it have to be done right now?”

Carlos had forgotten everything about anything other than this. Crusades and revenge and blood and trials — it all seemed so perilously insignificant. 

“Yeah, uh… yeah. We don’t gotta go anywhere.” She suddenly felt small in his arms, breakable. He was back onboard the helicopter, concerned about her fragility, as if a single wrong touch would send her wincing and clutching, and he unable to help. 

He smoothed her hair away from her forehead, kissed her there. “It’ll be okay. Okay? Everything’s gonna be fine.”

Jill fell asleep that night, swift and hard, as if pulled under by a weight. Carlos didn’t sleep. Not until at least four in the morning. The path had seemed so clear just a few hours ago. Now, as he watched her, there was a queer sense of unworthiness, like a man who’d been gifted a sprawling library, gilded and leather-bound, but hadn’t yet learned to read.

Overwhelmed with the enormity of the task in front of him, Carlos closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths. He would just do the next thing he knew how. It would have to be enough.

***

Kevin’s face, swollen and eaten with shining purple bruises, was turned down in a frown.

“Just try some soup,” Alyssa said, “you don’t have to chew it. If you can move your mouth to smoke, you can drink some soup. Okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, with a wince. The plastic tub of brown broth had bits of stuff in it — maybe vegetables, maybe garbage, Kevin didn’t know — but Alyssa had promised that Chinese joints made soup that was perfect for rainy, cold days. He had obliged, but was now regretting it. “Maybe I’ll try some. Here, pass it over.”

She had been here all day, cleaning and scrubbing and sweeping up bits of broken glass on her hands and knees. If Kevin hadn’t seen it himself he wouldn’t have believed Alyssa could clean anything — she hired people to do that kind of stuff for her in her own apartment. But here she was, swiping at his counters with a cloth and a bottle of solvent that smelled like pine trees.

“You don’t gotta do that, you know,” Kevin said, embarrassed. “I can get it.”

Alyssa gave him a look. “You can’t even walk under your own power yet. It won’t kill me to tidy the place up.”

Kevin steeled himself, and took a drink of the soup. It tasted like a high-brow sister of the broth left over after eating a bowl of 99 cent beef ramen. It wasn’t bad. He took another drink.

Alyssa crossed the room towards him. She sat on the edge of Kevin’s mattress, then looked at him in a way that could have been read as either resentment or pity, depending on what mood he was in. 

“I know you don’t agree, but we need to make sure whoever did this to you pays,” Alyssa said. “He can’t be allowed to hurt people whenever he thinks it’s right. He could have killed you.”

Kevin swallowed his mouthful of soup. “Look, Lyss… I know you’re comin’ from a good place on this.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it,” Alyssa said, “don’t do your cop thing on me. Your hostage situation talk-down shit.”

“It’s not a cop thing, it’s a person thing. I wish you could have seen him.”

“If I’d have seen him, I’d have shot him myself.”

“Nah,” Kevin said, “you wouldn’t have.” They fell into a silence. Kevin set the container down on his nightstand. “You know, I appreciate you. You comin’ over and taking care of things.”

Alyssa just nodded.

“You’re so… you know, big and important now, and you’re here scrubbing my counters and picking up glass,” he laughed, “I wasn’t sure you’d even take my call, with everything you’ve got going on. I guess I’m just trying to say that it means a lot to me.” 

“I got a job offer,” Alyssa interrupted, sudden and curt, “in Los Angeles. International affairs correspondence.”

“Oh. L.A.,” Kevin made a face the best he could, tried to make it out to be impressed, despite the hollow sinking in his stomach. “That’s, uh… that’s big time.”

“It is. I told them I’d take it. I start in September.” Her tone was confrontational, but Kevin realized it for what it was — guarding. _I’m leaving. What are you gonna do about it, huh? Say something, I dare you._

“Looks like I gotta find someone else to clean up after my fistfights, huh? Well, you deserve it. That’s what you wanted, so… that’s great news.” 

She nodded. “You’ve been my only real friend,” she said, “I don’t have many people I can trust. So that means a lot to me, too. I just…” she stammered, an uncharacteristic flash of vulnerability which disappeared as fast as it came, “I just wanted to tell you that.”

There it was — the f-word, _friend_ , four letters if Kevin had ever heard one. A little internal wince. He took another drink of his soup. “You got it. I’m proud of you.”

Alyssa just searched him with her eyes like chips of green glass, and then her expression became resigned, downcast. She stood from the bed. “It’s late,” she said, “I should probably get home. Are you sure you’re okay here tonight?”

“Oh yeah,” Kevin said, “no big deal. Thanks again for comin’ over. You’re a lifesaver.”

They said a dwindling goodbye, awkward and stilted. Alyssa saw herself out, the strap of her handbag over one broad shoulder. Kevin watched her leave and laid back, the pain in his face forgotten in favor of one that would stay for much longer.


	19. The Big Come Down

_“The fiercest anger of all,_   
_The most incurable,_   
_Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.”_   
_— Euripides, Medea and Other Plays_

  
The days and nights blurred together in an oily smear of yellow sunlight and humid blue dusks. They passed in a tilt-a-whirl chain with no events to differentiate them from one another other than the amount of light that filtered through the yellow-bronze curtains, and under the week’s rain, even that had failed. 

Chris didn’t sleep, these days. When he rested, there was no set pattern, no real relief. Chris would return back to his home base at various times of the day and fall into lapses of unbeing that were too close to death to be called sleep. He never felt refreshed when he rose, but he certainly felt tired. He was always tired. 

Chris awoke that day in a gradual way that filtered from the blackness of sleep to the dingy newspaper grey of mid-day. There used to be a brief moment between sleep and waking where only confusion lived as his brain came down to his surroundings, but now his surroundings were ground into his being with such permanence that he recognized them even when not fully conscious. That space was filled with weariness. 

The air conditioner, a metal box set in his window, banged and whirred like a car engine readying to throw a rod. A deep ache reverberated from Chris’ knuckles and the slender bones in his hands, like someone had bent those bones to almost breaking and then left them to their throbbing and their swelling. 

Chris pulled himself on sore joints and stiff muscles to sit on the edge of his bed. He had fallen asleep in his t-shirt and his jeans again. They were rumpled, warm with the animal heat of his sleeping body. He’d forgotten the last time he’d walked across the street to the Laundromart coin-op and slammed the silver quarter slots, and it was probably time, but that jaunt seemed like a marathon to his tired mind. 

Chris looked around the room. Laundry. A shower — his hair was getting greasy. You knew it was bad when you could kind of smell it. He should probably eat, at some point. Chris wasn’t a man that could be called a lover of food, most sophisticated flavors getting lost and blunted under the ever-present taste of cigarette smoke, but eating was something he did now simply to keep himself from getting low blood sugar shakes. He took no real pleasure in it, like a chore.

There had been things that made him happy, that made him excited, that were looked forward to. Chris couldn’t remember what those were, and now there was only the not-being and the being, pulling him along like a heavy chain welded to a manacle around his neck. But his happiness didn’t matter; not now. What he did now would be the reason he would be around to _be_ happy later. He and millions of other people.

Chris stripped off his shirt, determined to drag himself into the shower, at least. That would make him feel better, maybe jog his brain into getting ready for the day through rote memorization. Muscle memory. Chris pulled off the white cotton sheaf, over his head. The warm, thin jingle of metal dog tags getting caught and then bouncing against his bare chest. He was caught, frozen, halfway through — the shirt was covered down the front in rusty brown Rorschach splotches of blood. The picture in that blood was unclear; the artist had gotten too caught up in the medium to communicate the message effectively.

Ryman’s face, bloodied and swollen and broken open, flashed into Chris’ mind like a discordant note from an intrusive song, gone as soon as it came. It made his chest sore; it clenched on itself for a brief moment where his heart didn’t beat. Chris threw the shirt across the room like a large insect he’d found on his arm, shocked and dismayed, desperate to get away from his sudden interloper.

He tried to remember. It wasn’t a dream — most of Chris’ dreams these days were of violence, of blood, but never any as vivid as this. Chris covered his face and tried to remember. He’d had a lead, one which had now died under the power of simple human selfishness. Its heat and promise congealed into something cold, like the smell and tracks of fresh quarry leading around in a circle, eventually blown away on the night air. Chris had expected loyalty from Ryman once he’d divulged exactly what he needed and why, and when loyalty ended up not mattering to Ryman, Chris was certain that his coward’s self-interest could be bent and broken in his favor. Cajoled, somehow. Convinced. But Ryman had passed out before he talked… at least, that’s what Chris remembered. He didn’t recall much about that night, the memories having fallen into a black pit of nothingness; like sleeping, but on your feet. He remembered talking. He remembered considering using… something, it was hard to remember, but deciding against it. After that, everything was hazy and dark and impossibly loud, like the terror of being screamed at by a stranger from pitch black corners of a dark house. Chris had awoken on his feet, Ryman’s limp, lifeless body outstretched beneath him, a fount of garnet red blood that bubbled and spilled from gashes and broken places, soaking the carpet. It was all over Chris’ fists, spots on his face, in his mouth, on his clothes. 

Chris remembered throwing up, having to make a break for the toilet before he let loose his dinner all over the carpet. He shook, shook like a stubborn leaf clinging to the branch in a stiff wind. His strength flagged in and out under cold tingles and loose joints. He checked Ryman’s pulse, nicotine-stained fingers trembling against pallid skin slick with sweat, desperate for reassurance. When he found it beating, the stubborn pump of a stout heart, Chris’ own slowed. Chris tried to wake him, shook him, splashed water on his face. Ryman wouldn’t come to the fore; straight dark eyelashes fluttered in effort, but his lids remained shut. His shudders of breath and swollen face were hard to witness, each glance an icy splinter against something soft and open and essential deep in Chris’ brain. Eventually, Chris rolled Kevin onto his stomach, dragged him into the bathtub, made sure he wouldn’t suffocate, and left. The investigation and the pools of Ryman’s blood had both cooled at about the same clip, losing their heat and meaning with each passing moment.

Chris rubbed his eyes. The rain pattered and plinked outside, bouncing off of the failing air conditioner, and he looked at the circular wall clock and its accusatory ticking hands. 2:30pm.

Something in his brain folded. He laid back down. He’d already slept most of the day away — he could sleep a little while longer. What would it matter? It could wait a few more hours. Maybe then he’d have some energy to do laundry.

***

  
Carlos didn’t like the feeling in the air.

Ever since he’d woken up this morning (at half-past nine, which felt weird, but he’d never called in before so fuck ‘em) that feeling was was tense, laid over with a silence of words saved up like a stormcloud. Jill was already awake, messing with a pot of bubbling coffee. It felt to Carlos like a hesitance of the first to move, of trying to feel out the other person. As much time as they’d spent together, Carlos liked to think he was getting a handle on her moods and quirks, and she on his: it could easily be read as the silent treatment, but something in his deepest, most instinctual parts recognized it as much more sympathetic, studded with a feeling of vulnerability that softened it. 

Carlos’ stubborn tendency to play peacemaker reared its head. He approached Jill as she sat on the couch drinking from a steaming mug of coffee, a blanket spread over her lap. Carlos leaned one shoulder against the doorway, and Jill sensed his presence, turned to him. He squinted into the air in thought, held up one long finger, then asked:

“D’you hear about the guy who invented the knock-knock joke?”

Jill blinked at him, prettily, her lips pursed; she tilted her head just so in an expression of interest. She wasn’t wearing makeup, dressed in an oversized sweater, her brown hair bent and rumpled. It was getting longer, now down to the middle of her slender neck, and it moved with her while she shook her head. She took a sip of her coffee while she waited for him to speak again.

“He won the no-bell prize.” 

Silence. Carlos spread his hands with an open-mouthed smile on his face, as if inviting the laughter that wasn’t coming. 

After a moment, Jill snickered, forced herself to swallow, and it sounded like her drink almost went up her nose. “What is wrong with you?” 

“I’m practicing! C’mon, that one was great.”

Jill laughed, a low, warm sound that somehow also managed to be sarcastic. “No it wasn’t.”

“The fact it wasn’t good means it’s good. See? I’m a natural.”

“Oh my God. You’re not allowed to talk anymore, not until this cup is _totally_ empty.”

That weird, stagnant feeling in the air lightened, as if those word-clouds realized they’d gotten the wrong idea and began to blow away, left cracks of sunshine in their wake. He sat down beside her and she looked glad of it, as if relieved to finally be talking to him though he’d been within twenty feet of her all morning.

“How’re you feeling?” He asked.

“I’m okay,” she said, and indicated her cup by holding tilting it to and fro, “drugs help. How about you?”

Carlos shrugged. He bounced his heel on the floor; a habit of the constantly moving. “I’m always good. You don’t gotta worry about me.” Then, “I think I’m gonna go see Kevin today. See how he’s doin’.” It was partially true, not _really_ a lie. Good enough for government work. “You got any plans?”

“Not sure yet. I might just go over my notes again.” She took another drink. “But I think I’ve read them enough for my eyes to bleed at this point. I could probably recite them backwards at a traffic stop.”

“Sounds like… fun. You know, you _can_ watch TV or something instead.”

Jill raised an eyebrow like she wasn’t sure what that meant. “Like what?”

Carlos’ expression was blank. She may as well have just asked him to describe the color blue or the number two. “I dunno, Sally Jesse? Beavis and Butthead? Turn off the ol’ noodle and take it easy, maybe?”

“That does sound kind of nice. Not…” she clarified, giggling, with a _hold on now_ raise of her hand, “…Beavis and Butthead, but… taking a break, maybe. My head hurts.”

“Well,” he reached out, gently tousled the hair on the top of her head, “you should stop doin’ the thing that’s hurtin’ it.” 

“Thinking?” She leaned into his hand and closed her eyes. 

Carlos nodded. He trailed his fingers down the side of her face, thumbed her chin affectionately. “That’ll get you every time.” Carlos found himself mentally tracing the outline of her profile while she looked away, smiling. Wondering about her chin and her nose; who she inherited them from. 

“You’re probably right. Maybe I’ll just take today off.”

“Sounds like a good plan.” Carlos pushed himself to a stand. Normally so self-assured, he found himself fumbling, not sure what to say. He clapped his hand on top of a fist in a gesture of wordless awkwardness as he backed away, then asked, “I’m gonna be gone for a while, but do you… want anything on my way back? Food, or…?”

Jill shook her head. “Nothing sounds good. But… thanks.”

“Right. Okay. I’ll see you later.”

She smiled again, as if his sudden awkwardness was charming and not embarrassing. “Be careful.” She said, with an expression of lifted eyebrows; _I’m trusting you to do the right thing_ , it said.

Carlos excused himself with that, aimed a great mental kick at himself, wondering where his normally abundant powers of social lubrication had suddenly fucked off to. He was partially grateful for it — she hadn’t predicted the real reason for his departure, and if she had, didn’t say as much. She definitely would have tried to stop him if she had, maybe given him some sort of fiery speech, as was her way. No dice. Not today.

Of course, it wasn’t totally a lie — he was going to see Kevin. But before that, Carlos had a date at a motel, somewhere down by the waterfront.

***

  
Chris woke up again at just past 8:30 at night. The rain hadn’t stopped. The dark, the sounds of the drops off of the pavement outside; it was what his little sister Claire had declared as “nap weather” when she was tiny and hadn’t learned to pronounce her Rs as Rs and not Ws yet, “nap wedduw”, curl up and sleep under a blanket wedduw. The rain made Chris dozy and tired, blurred the world around the edges, like the side effect of a drug. But he couldn’t sleep all day long. There were things that had to be done, even if he dreaded the thought of them.

Chris thought about washing the white shirt. Maybe scrubbing it with some vinegar or some bleach. He couldn’t bring himself to touch it where it sat in a rumple against the corner of the floor and the wall; he walked over and around it, like a sleeping rattlesnake, studiously avoided looking at it. Eventually he shoved it into a trash can, glad that it was gone. Chris gathered his clothes into an olive drab gunny bag, slung it over his shoulder, and started his journey in a trudge, walked down the hall, over the outdated carpet, its brown and orange swirls lost under a wide stripe of grey dirt drug over its fibers from countless sets of feet. The girl behind the counter didn’t look up from her homework, huddled over her textbook with one headphone over her ear like always. He pushed the front door open, rubbed at his eyes, still not completely awake.

Then, and voice, loud and clear: “Chris.”

Chris stopped, then looked up. Oliveira stood with his powerful arms crossed, leaned back against the hood of Chris’ truck. He was wearing a coat with a high collar, the hood of a sweater pulled up around his face. The rain beat around his shoulders like a mist, and his face was hard and unkind under the shadows.

Oliveira unzipped his jacket, threw it on the ground. The rain immediately pelted his sweater, turned it from a light grey to dark. He’d removed the laces from the hood. Smart. Oliveira leaned away from the truck. He was wearing thick-soled workboots, and they hit the ground under his weight in heavy thumps. He approached, and Chris’ arm moved on its own; he dropped the heavy bag over his shoulder to the pavement. He started towards Oliveira, conversation the last thing on his mind. 

“Don’t look so shocked, fucker,” the larger man said, “I’m here to talk about what you did to Kevin.” 

Chris paused. Kevin’s voice, pleading and screaming for Chris to stop, cut through the night air, and then ceased back into the pattering of the driving rain.

Oliveira stopped, close enough to start a war, close enough for Chris to smell what brand of deodorant he used, his hands remained on his hips, his torso completely open, like a challenge. His eyes were tilted down. Direct contact. “Would you believe that he doesn’t want me to beat your ass? Took off parts of his face like a fuckin’ can opener, and he was still tellin’ me how good of a guy you were. He seems to think you’re sick. Like…” Oliveira twirled a finger by his temple, whistled a brief, sharp note. Cuckoo. 

Chris flinched, forward momentum stopped like someone had clapped their hands directly in front of his face. His eyes blinked hard and narrow, and he backed away, by just a twitch. “I didn’t mean to,” Chris said, “ _I told him._ We were talking. I didn’t… just… just stop saying that.”

“What, that you’re crazy?” Oliveira didn’t flinch. "’Talking’. Fuck you. You still need someone to beat on, or they gotta be half a foot shorter than you to get your dick hard?”

“None of this would have happened if you would have just _left_ ,” Chris said, wincing against a sudden, throbbing pain in the side of his head, “why are you still here?”

“Because fuck you, that’s why. That’s your problem. You think people are scared of you. You don’t know how to handle it when you’re not the biggest gorilla in the jungle anymore and nobody gives a shit about your orders. You wanted me so damn bad you were willin’ to turn Kevin’s face into hamburger over it, so--”

Something attracted Oliveira’s eyes; they searched Chris’ face like a man looking for evidence, fluttered over his lines and his crags. 

“Jesus Christ,” he said, with an expression like he’d seen something particularly horrifying, with a tone in his voice that another man may have wondered who the comment was really meant for -- Chris or Oliveira himself. “You really are sick.”

The word freed something in Chris’ brain, let loose some monster shackled to the wet red walls of his skull. With a cry that started as a sound deep in his throat and crescendoed into a yell of anger, of frustration, of loss, Chris launched himself at Oliveira, rammed his shoulder under the tall man’s ribs and carried him, slammed him against the side of his truck. There was a brief scuffle in which they struggled for the high ground, and between Oliveira’s reach advantage and the slippery effect of the rain that made him impossible to hold, Olivera looped his arms under Chris’, yanked him up to a stand with a force that was surprising. His forehead met Chris’ twice, knocking him back in an explosion of stars and ringing. When Chris rushed him again, the larger man was nowhere to be found, ducked out of the way, save for his hand that wound around Chris’ throat, long fingers biting into the throbbing pulse on either side of his windpipe. 

Chris’ feet left the ground. Everything spun, and he landed hard, flat on his back and his neck into a puddle of ice-cold rainwater, and the world blinked out into blackness, the air sucked out of his lungs. Oliveira looked down at him, his breaths ragged. Chris expected Oliveira to round on him, slam one of his huge workboots into the side of his head, maybe break his ribs into shards under them. Oliveira just watched him, hands on his hips, as the cold rain belted Chris’ face. “Just fucking _stop_ , man. We don't gotta--”

"Shut the fuck up," Chris groaned, the taste of blood in his mouth. Oliveira extended a hand to him to help him up and Chris ignored it, rolled onto his side, struggled back to his feet. Oliveira sighed, shook his head, took a circling step back and away. "Just... just shut up."

It was impossible to tell how long the fight lasted, but was over before Chris realized it; Oliveira was content to eat Chris’ punches in order to move in close, taking blows directly on the chin, in the stomach, always bobbling back up for more like one of those inflatable clown dolls that rocked on its base. Oliveira took one of Chris’ particular hard blows directly on his jawline, then turned, slammed his own fists straight into Chris’ mouth in a chain of freight-train punches that were freed with speed and accuracy that, he realized too late, marked him as trained in and terribly suited to doing just this sort of violence. He’d been goaded into standing up against a man who excelled in knocking people down. The last punch, a haymaker that Chris saw in the last flash of a second before impact but his body refused to dive out of the way of, disoriented and sluggish, sent Chris tumbling and spinning, landed him hard on concrete that bit into his elbows and knees. Blood poured from the root of a tooth in the back of his mouth that had suddenly been freed from its moorings and it felt like he’d been hit by a cement truck, the whole side of his face numb with the promise of later pain. His mouth wouldn't work, sluggish and drooling and bleeding. One of his ears rung, a high-pitched sonic whine that made him want to vomit.

The world blinked and faded, that same blackness swallowing the parking lot and his assailant both in its gradual shift into sleepwalk aggression; Chris awoke again when one of Oliveira's huge boots was against his wrist, stomped it to the ground. One of the delicate bones inside it snapped, its broken pieces grinding against each other. Chris cried out in pain, and Oliveira leaned over. Picked up Chris' pistol, which just a moment ago had been in its holster against his side, but was now freed, in Chris' hand, the safety switched off.

Chris looked at the gun in desperate fear. He had no idea how the pistol got into his hand: he hadn’t reached for it. Hadn’t planned to use it, though he carried it everywhere he went. When he looked back up, Oliveira's face as he studied the pistol's chrome angles and edges was murderous: mouth set in a line, head shaking in slow disbelief, nostrils flared, his dark eyes flashing with something close to malice. To hatred. After a long moment, that look of murder, of hiding bodies, died. Faded back into something like resolve. He re-engaged the safety and shoved it into the back waistband of his pants.

The rain drove and splashed on the empty parking lot, only the two men around to hear its song. There was a deep scraping and Chris was dragged, dragged into the cover of decorative bushes beside the building, through the sticker brambles and colorful flowers deep into the hedges, away from sight. Oliveira’s arms clamped around Chris' neck, squeezed like a cinch being tightened. No air got in or out, stopped curtly at the median of his arm around Chris’ throat. The man wrenched him, made to roll him onto his stomach where Chris would have no way to fight back to his feet, where death would be imminent. Oliveira’s weight was on his back, oppressive and consuming. He felt the taller man’s hair, wet and thick and dripping cold water down the side of Chris’ face, down his neck. Chris fought him like a wildcat, but his injuries were too great, and Oliveira strained against him. It was a foregone conclusion -- he had the high ground, was relatively uninjured, was taller, perhaps stronger than Chris. Oliveira eventually overwhelmed Chris' struggling, slamming him down on the cedar chips and the dirt and the mud on his stomach, crouched over his form on strong legs, hovering like a carnivorous insect waiting to nip its prey's head off once that prey finished its ineffective flailing throes of disbelief in its own demise.

“I’m doin’ you a favor, fucker.” Oliveira snarled in hot puffing breaths through his teeth, directly in Chris' ear. “Just shut the fuck up and go to sleep before I slam your ass again.” 

Chris was strong, but the reach advantage of those precious few inches, the length of the taller man’s arms let him wind out of range of Chris’ elbows and still keep his grip in those long, agonizing minutes as the world flickered and faded. Chris was a fighter; no doubt about that. He fought and fought, and a few times got close to freeing himself. But his brain, starved of oxygen and determined to keep him alive, eventually convinced him it was okay to just let go for now. To save what air remained for his vital organs, like a mother doling out scant food to too many children while she went to sleep starving.

Chris’ arms stopped doing what he bid them. Blows turned to taps turned to impotent waves and then to nothing. Eventually Oliveira let him fall face-first into the brambles and the cold, wet soil chips, the smell of earth and water was his world as his body fought for breath. The ground below disappeared, nothing but air under his chest and his hands and his face, and everything tilted into blackness. 


	20. Man in the Box

Kevin’s mouth was agape, like a fish. The hole where his teeth had been punched out on the right side of his mouth winked blackness at Carlos, and he thought Kevin looked like one of those hillbillies you’d see on cartoons, barefoot, dressed in overalls and backed by a jug band. “Did you…” Kevin sputtered, “is he _dead_?!”

Carlos looked at the form in the backseat, slumped and rumpled, face-down on the upholstery. Chris’ back rose, slow and sure, fell in time. “Breathin’, isn’t he?” Carlos tried for a joke, but found it fell flat in the distance between he and his friend under the seriousness of the circumstances. “I just… y’know, choked him out. A little.”

“A little?!” Kevin repeated, incredulous. 

“Maybe a lot,” Carlos said, as if correcting himself on a minor lie of omission, “but not all the way. I think.”

“Well… not like he didn’t deserve it, or nothin’…” Kevin agreed, after a moment’s consideration. He fished in the pockets of his blue jeans for a smoke, and when he returned with one, lit it with hands that tremored. “God bless America. You gonna take him to the hospital?” 

Carlos rubbed his face. His short beard made a sandpapery noise against his fingers. “Maybe,” he said, “think his wrist is hurt.”

“I meant as a psych patient, genius. The E.R. takes those too.” Kevin took one look at Carlos’ empty expression, and sighed. “I keep forgetting you weren’t a cop. They’ll, uh… they might believe me cause of my face if I tell ‘em he attacked me and you took him out. Right?”

“Dunno. Will they?”

“Yeah. Probably. It’s our best shot. Either way he needs to be somewhere the walls are padded and they got them 19-inch pythons strapped down.”

“Okay. Well, get in before he wakes up and I gotta choke him out all the way, this time.”

“Ohhh, look at me, I’m Heavy,” Kevin mocked him as he rounded to the passenger side, pitched his voice low, deep in his chest, “hurr durr durr. I’m so big and strong. Get in my car before I punch it and we gotta walk.”

Carlos threw the first thing he saw at Kevin, an empty Gatorade bottle in his cup holder. It hit Kevin’s temple with the corner of its round base and spun away into the night with an empty noise — _plonk_. 

“Ow! Motherfucker, what’s your problem?!”

“You,” Carlos said, and laughed. “Just buckle up, asshole.”

“Swear to God, zero respect,” Kevin grumbled as he clicked his belt secure, and they were off into Washington rain with their quarry in tow.

***

  
Chris awoke in a groggy, fitful way that made him feel like a smear of human residue on the underside of a truck. There were bright colors all around him; whites and creams and blues, and he struggled to make sense of what he saw as the images tilted and bobbed. A cry from somewhere far away, a scream of refusal. It curdled Chris’ blood and perked his ears, jolted him all the way awake. Chris saw Ryman, in his blue jeans and black t-shirt; he winced, jogged across the room to close the door and block out the noise.

“Jesus,” said another voice.

When Ryman turned around, his eyes caught Chris, and he came close to the bed. “Hey, you’re not dead!” 

The room swam in milky impermanence. Everything was light and airy, like gravity had been turned down by a notch or two. It made memory difficult. Chris groaned; his entire body hurt, especially the back of his head.

“Where…” he stammered, “I feel… what’d you do to me…?”

“I didn’t do shit,” Ryman said, and pointed across the room to the other side of Chris’ bed, “you want that guy.”

Chris turned his head. It was slow, like turning a heavy piece of camera equipment determined to scan everything on its journey across. His eyes settled on Oliveira, who stood beside the bed with his hands on his hips. He’d taken off his sweater and set it over the room’s radiator to dry, and under the harsh clinical lights of the hospital, the white of his tank top was stark against the strong tawny brown of his skin. Even the ringlets of his hair, dark as volcanic rock, had dried in a way that looked intentional. Chris remembered in a way less like recalling fact and more like trying to grab scraps of a dream in his fists and smash them together to make some sort of sense — whatever had transpired in the fight between them hadn’t mussed Oliveira up too bad; not even a split lip or a black eye to be seen, a detail which hurt Chris’ pride in a distant way all the same from his hospital bed.

“I remember,” Chris said, his voice a simmer, just north of a growl. “I remember you trying to kill me.” Chris expected a grimace of anger, a yell, maybe even to be grabbed up by his lapels and shaken; Oliveira laughed, a dismissive _tch_ of a noise, rolled his dark eyes. 

“This asshole,” Oliveira said, and shook his head.

“He _could have_ killed you,” Kevin interrupted, “but he didn’t. Remember that part before you start runnin’ your fuckin’ yap in your glass house, Chris.”

“I’m supposed to think I’m laid up with a broken wrist you and two are… what, worried about me?” Chris said, unconvinced. The ridiculousness made him smile, laugh. It made both the men who hovered by his bed take on expressions of discomfort and look at each other in tandem. “Right.”

“You may not believe him,” Oliveira said, “but the name Jill ring a bell? She’s awful worried ‘bout you.”

Chris paused. He tried to remember what Jill’s face looked like, and when he couldn’t recall it, it made him frustrated. “I don’t need to be in a hospital. I’m not…” Chris flinched, made to sit up, “I’m not crazy.”

“Crazy or not, you need medical help.” Kevin said. “We all do, and we all got it. Except you. You’re in here ‘cause we want you around,” his gray eyes, the color of the iron sky outside, were serious. “That’s all, man.”

“He’s undersellin’ it.” Oliveira said. “Both Kevin _and_ Jill told me you were a good dude, and you ain’t been actin’ like one. They’re both better people’n me, so I trust their judgment. You’ve all got history, but I don’t, and someone had to set your ass straight before you really hurt someone. Fact you were tearin’ a hole through people I love to get to me just made it easier to justify.”

Chris looked at Kevin. “Is that true?”

Kevin sputtered, through a laugh. “I mean — yeah. We worked together for like ten years, dude. You think I secretly thought you were Patrick Bateman the entire time? You went through some heavy shit and you need help to handle it. I meant what I said, whether or not I can make the same sounds with my mouth now.”

Chris shook his head. “Why? Why not just…” Chris stopped short. It might have been easier for everyone if Oliveira had finished the job, and to his addled brain, the larger man’s reasons were still unclear. 

“You don’t wanna hear it from me,” Oliveira said, “but we got more in common than we got otherwise, like it or not. You don’t gotta believe me, but they already took enough from us. Don’t start givin’ things away you can’t get back.”

“They,” Chris said, “you mean you?”

Oliveira shrugged. “I can’t go back and not work for ‘em. That’s on me to wrestle with. You gotta focus on what you’re fighting with, or you’re gonna start lookin’ more like Umbrella than I ever did.”

The flint hit the tinder, but no spark spat into the dry brush of Chris’ brain to light the wildfire. They’d given him something — something made it easier to think, easier to exist. He didn’t realize how painful existing had been now that it was different. Now that his jaws weren’t locked together, teeth grinding. Their arguments began to permeate; to make sense, in a distant, roundabout sort of way.

“Not everyone gets a second chance,” Kevin added, “and I know you deserve one. Maybe you just need some help to realize that.”

Chris let his head fall back against the pillow. “Why didn’t you do it?”

Oliveira blinked at him. “Do what?”

Chris fixed him with a look, and was otherwise silent.

Oliveira‘s heavy brows knit down; he moved, an uncomfortable half-squirm which, under his broad, powerful build, looked odd and even a bit childish. “I don’t wanna hurt nobody,” he said, “we already got enough hurt for a lifetime. That’s not me, man.”

“He’s right,” Kevin said. “Whatever past is past, but we’re gettin’ into shit that stays broken once you smash it. You gotta let it go. We can’t let them do what they do then pit us against each other. There ain’t a lot of us left.”

Chris swallowed. Made to argue. But Kevin’s face, with its shining cancerous bruises and puffs of swollen flesh, quieted him. Made him ashamed. Instead, he looked at Oliveira. “Is she okay?”

“Jill?”

Chris nodded. At the mention of her name a ghost of a smile turned up Oliveira’s features, lit his face from within, like remembering she existed put him in a better space in his mind. Chris remembered the feeling well. “She’s good, man. Maybe you guys can talk in a little while. I told her about what’s been goin’ on, but I don’t gotta tell her about this. Not unless you want me to.”

“I’ll know if you’re lying to me.” Chris said. “If you hurt her, they won’t be able to give me enough drugs to keep from taking it out of you.”

“Make you a deal,” Oliveira said, “if I hurt her, whatever’s left after Jill’s done with me and I get done kicking my own ass, you can have what’s left.”

Kevin pulled up a wooden upholstered chair. Its legs squawked against the tiled floor. “I know what you’re thinking — you’re gonna wait til nobody’s lookin’ then get outta that bed and beat feet. Not fuckin’ so, Kemosabe. I’m gonna sit my ass right here and watch you. I can scream like a little girl if I need to, don’t test me.”

Chris felt odd and annoyed about being fretted over; the compassion overwhelmed his already weak mind, and he was still not sure he was wrong. But it made it easier to accept if he was. Doors he’d slammed shut and bolted from the inside were now cracked, propped open for him if he cared to come back through. It was a lot to digest. A lot to adjust to. His head hurt, a little, under a swimmy, pleasant sort of feeling which set him on edge because the pain — his constant friend — was now gone.

“So this is what it’s like being on the other side,” Chris said. The men were quiet, confused, and then he said by way of explanation, “being in custody.”

“A joke?” Kevin laughed, “From you?”

“I’m impressed,” Oliveira said with a breath through his nose, one side of his mouth pulled up.

“I think I’m going to sleep.” Chris said. “It’s… been a long few days.”

“No shit,” Kevin said, “I’m gonna go have a smoke. Heavy, you good?”

“I gotta go in a few, but yeah, go ahead.”

Kevin left them alone. Oliveira took the seat beside Chris’ bed, distracted by his phone; he clicked the buttons with a large thumb, his face tired, propped on his other hand.

“I’ll try,” Chris said, and Oliveira blinked up at him. In that moment, with the help of the drugs, Oliveira didn’t look malicious or evil or sly, he just looked like a man — vulnerable and open and listening to another human’s emotions. “But it’s… raw. I can’t tell you I’ll be able to. I’m not like…” Chris grumbled and shook his head, “I’m not like Kevin, Oliveira. I don’t know if I can.”

“Carlos. Haven’t been Oliveira since I got out of the Corps.” He said. “And we can both try. S’all we can do, man.”

Chris considered this. “What changed? Was it…” _What I did to Kevin?_ , Chris wanted to say, but his mouth wouldn’t form the words, weighted by shame. Carlos seemed to understand, thought this over for a few long, quiet moments, his eyes cast down under their heavy, dark lashes. 

“It’s always changing, man,” Carlos said, “let’s just leave it at that.”

When Kevin returned, Chris was already asleep, head bowed under the weight of heavy sedatives. Carlos watched the window, leaned back in the chair, bounced one heel on the ground. 

“That was quick,” Kevin said, “guess you really wore him out.”

“Yeah, well,” Carlos said, and stood from the chair, “seems like it did him some good. You said you’re straight to stay?”

“Yeah. I can stay for a few days,” he said, “’til Monday. Wonder if he’ll be better by then. After that, maybe Jill—” 

“No,” Carlos cut him off, abrupt, and louder than he intended. Kevin looked at him in surprise. “No.” Carlos quieted his tone, as if in apology. “That’s not gonna work.”

“They were friends a long time, Heavy,” Kevin said, with a touch of wariness that wasn’t without understanding, “whatever’s between them’s been over a long time, and I think—”

“…wait, what?” Carlos said. “What’re you talkin’ about?”

“Oh, uh—” Kevin stammered, now aware he’d shoved his entire leg into his gob. “I mean, I thought she— I thought you— um… well, fuck. Well, they did kinda have… y’know, something, way back in the day, and—”

“It’s not about that, man. Just… we gotta think of something else.”

Kevin regarded him with a breed of suspicion, but didn’t push the issue. “’Til Monday,” he repeated, “we can think of somethin’ else then.”

They were both quiet. Kevin spoke again. “Did you mean it?”

Carlos looked at him. “Mean what?”

Kevin shrugged, uncomfortable now that he was made to explain. “You uh… you said you loved me. And Jill. Earlier.”

Carlos didn’t even take a moment to think about it, just fired back with a smile, “Course, man. I mean, they’re different kinds of love, but sure. You’re my dude.” A jab of his thumb back towards the bed, “You see how I fucked this joker up for you?”

Kevin nodded, held out his hands, walked into Carlos’ body and encircled him in a hug. Carlos was shocked, but returned it, clapped Kevin on the back. “You good?” He laughed.

“Yeah,” Kevin said, “I just needed that, I think.”

***

Carlos didn’t know if Chris would be better by Monday. Or if he’d be better, ever. He hoped he would be, for Jill’s sake; he didn’t much care about the man past how what happened to him would hurt _her_. It felt like rooting for a certain sports team because a loved one sorely wanted to see them win some sort of pennant or a cup after a long dry spell. But left to his own devices, Carlos had not seen a single game in Chris’ season; not witnessed his injuries and disqualifications and the comebacks he’d mounted just to make it to the playoffs. And while Carlos wished no harm on the man, he found precious little reason to care if he fell to harm due to outside forces, either. 

Carlos cracked the front door and the faded smell of meat and spices wafted out as the air was released. His stomach yelled at him with sudden urgency. Carlos would know the smell anywhere; it was _picanha_ , his favorite, barbecued steak seasoned with coarse salt and garlic and parsley. A side dish of fragrant grilled onions and egg was nestled against the cut of meat, and it took a Herculean amount of self-control to not grab up the dish and devour it, cold, with his bare hands. Jill had picked up some kind of take out in black plastic containers, had set the table, fallen asleep on the couch with her head against the armrest. The TV flickered with the residual light of grey-blue images against her still, lovely face, her food untouched. 

Carlos took a quick shower to scrub the night’s misgivings off of him. He could smell the rain, the dirt, the blood, and a strange, thin tendril of medical alcohol stink. He put his hands over his face to rub the soap over his skin and the scraping jingle of the shower curtain on its rod sounded above him; a slender pair of arms circled his hips, the warmth of a face against his upper back.

“Did everything go okay?” Jill asked. The sound of her voice bounced around in the tiny plastic cocoon, competed with the sizzling spray of water for his ears.

“Oh yeah,” Carlos said, and rinsed his face under the jets with his eyes squeezed shut, tried to keep the tone in his voice light, conversational. “He’s good now.”

Jill nodded. Her hair, now wet, slid against his skin. He could feel her eyelashes beat against him, like the wings of a moth.

“Would you tell me if you went somewhere else other than Kevin’s?” She asked.

It felt close to being caught in an affair — something Carlos had stumbled into once or twice in his younger, dumber years, when your brain hadn’t yet matured enough to care about other people outside of your own self-interest. That feeling of being caught doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing, of having to come up with an excuse on the spot, of jumping into the shower to wash the night’s deeds off of you, trying to dispose of the evidence and getting caught all the same. The air caught in his chest and he took a deep breath in through his nose, finished washing his face. Jill was quiet, still leaned against him, her arms low around his waist.

He remembered her face when they’d first spoken on the swings in the swirling bouts of snow, how her eyes had implored the truth and he’d made the decision to not keep it from her. How long ago that felt, now.

“Yeah,” he said, and the note of defeat in his voice was clear. “Yeah, let’s talk about it after we get out.”

“I’d rather talk now,” she said, and he knew what she was doing — not giving him time to think up an excuse that sounded plausible. Jill was without a doubt the most intelligent woman he’d ever been with, let alone the most intelligent person he’d ever met. Her chess-club detective’s brain erected hurdles he wasn’t used to having to jump, ill-prepared to come home to the human equivalent of a scalpel that made surgical cuts in his little white lies and excuses and removed them in a way that made it sound like Carlos’ idea. How she did it was still a mystery to him, and though her intelligence was a turn-on, it was also a complication. “Where did you go?”

Carlos sighed. It wasn’t a noise he made a lot in day-to-day life. He untangled Jill’s arms from around him, turned to her, looked down into her face. 

“Look,” he said, “do you trust me?”

Jill’s eyes searched his face, as if looking for the reason behind the question. There was a faint breed of panic there. “Of course,” she said, quiet.

“Kevin and I ended up takin’ your friend Chris to the emergency room. Kevin’s idea.”

Jill’s face didn’t move, didn’t change. “Why didn’t you bring me with you?” She asked. “I could have helped — he would have listened to me. Why the emergency room? Did you hurt him? Did…” she searched Carlos’ face again and found no injury, looked at his hands. Carlos removed them from her before she could get a good look at his knuckles, put his palms on the sides of her face.

“I did it to make sure you were safe,” he said, “I couldn’t risk you bein’ around him, not like he is now. Not with…” Carlos trailed off.

“Did you hurt him?” Jill asked, again. 

Carlos paused. “His arm’s a little banged up. Might have a black eye.” 'Might' was a massive understatement; he’d given Chris what was known as _The Business_ when he’d decided he wanted to get aggressive and turn it into a stand-up fight, and was shocked when none of the bones in his face had turned out to be broken. “He didn’t wanna go. But Kevin and I got him to a hospital where they can treat him for whatever’s gone wrong in his brain. Kevin’s idea. Funny, right? Kevin doing the thinking, for once.” Jill didn’t laugh. Didn’t find this funny at all, if her face was any indication. Carlos let the joke deflate. “Look… I know you’re not happy. But you gotta understand. You didn’t see what he did to Kevin. I couldn’t risk that happening to you. I couldn’t let you do that.”

“I’m not a thing that gets risked or not.” Jill said, her voice not scolding or unkind, and it was strange, her tone at total odds with the words. “You still have to include me. You don’t get to make these decisions for me.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I just did what I thought would be best. Y’know… considering.”

It changed her tack. Softened it. “Did he hurt you?”

Under the beat of misting shower jets and the intimacy of their shroud of steam, this conversation about about truth and lies, Carlos considered letting it all loose — considered telling her how Redfield had pulled a gun on him before he’d broken the man’s wrist to get it away. They always said your life flashes before your eyes in those moments, but Carlos’ didn’t. He didn’t think of the dusty trails and towering piles of bright technicolor houses of his childhood home in Brazil, or of New York, with its everpresent blink of lights and frenetic energy, or his mom, or his entire football league’s worth of cousins and aunts and uncles, or even Jill; it was an abject refusal to go not because of where he’d been, but of some responsibility unfulfilled. A responsibility beyond the drama of viruses in little glass phials and mercenaries with intimidating layers of gear that clanked as they marched, spread into doomed cities like rows of ants. Something simpler. Something he had yet to do, and wasn’t sure what it looked like, but knew it had to be him. It flashed before him all the same, guided his actions as surely as the past ever had.

“He tried,” Carlos said, “but he wasn’t on it, tonight. The point is we’re both safe, and he’s gonna get the help he needs.” To her unchanged face, he said: “I did it for you. You said he was your friend — I didn’t want him gettin’ hurt, either. And hopefully now he won’t.” He paused, tried to think of something else to add, but only came up with: “I’m not used to… not… runnin’ off and doin’ what I think is right. But I get where you’re comin’ from. You just gotta believe me.”

Jill touched his face in turn. “If that’s what you said happened, then… that’s what happened. Just promise me you’re not going to keep anything else from me. Okay? Even if you think there’s a good reason.”

“Okay,” Carlos said, surprised. It felt like a gift, of being let off easy. “Promise. But Kevin did say somethin’ that you didn’t mention… he said that you and Chris were… back in the day. You know.”

Jill blinked at him. “Maybe,” she said, “once. It didn’t get very far, though. He left me. Just up and vanished.”

“Well, finders keepers,” Carlos laughed. “What a dumbass.” And that was that.

“I’m not going to disagree with you. But — one more thing we have to get straight,” she said, traced the line of his collarbone with her fingertips, “you’re not _letting_ me do anything. You don’t suddenly have dominion over me. Got it?” 

“Alright, I’m not sure what that means,” he leaned closer in response to her touch, his voice soft, “but I’m pretty sure you just told me to go fuck myself.”

Jill smiled at him. “I never ask people to do things I can take care of.” 

Carlos grabbed her up, and Jill made a shriek of surprise, pushed at him as he kissed and nipped at her throat. Jill tried to lean away, giggling, and slipped, braced herself against the walls with a shocked look on her face. 

“Maybe the shower’s not the best place for this anymore,” she said with a nervous laugh as he pulled her back to her feet, “my balance is _way_ off.”

“That’s okay,” he said, undeterred, “I got enough for the both of us.”

It seemed Jill’s condition changed a few key things. Chief of which, the amount of energy she had to expend at any moment. It made for an interesting experience; no sooner than they had finished, she turned from energetic and even aggressive to a yawning, flagging slump. Carlos had to drag her back to the couch with him from where she tried to lay down on the bathroom tiles.  
  
“You gonna eat?” He asked. He poked her gently with the plastic fork provided with the meal. “You should eat. C’mon, you got some good stuff.”

Jill shook her head, eyes closed. “Not hungry,” she said.

“I’m gonna eat your dinner if you don’t.”

“I gonna,” she mumbled, and was gone.

Carlos shrugged. He’d given her fair warning. He dumped Jill’s food onto his plate, settled back with her under the blanket, ate his cold dinner while she slept against one of his legs. He was content to refuel his tired body and — once he was sure she was asleep — watch Beavis and Butthead until the wee hours, a simple reward for a night of jobs well done.

Carlos was unaware, as was his way, of the impact his actions that night would have going forward into the next few months, even the next few years. Of how the power of his branching decisions would change his own life, and the life of the woman sleeping against his thigh, and even the life of the tiny little thing inside _her_ body, no bigger than a marble or a pea at this juncture. Of how the mercy he’d shown would end up resulting in doom, as mercy often did.

*** 

Kevin didn’t need to stay after Monday, or even to Monday. He spent Saturday flirting with the nurses to amuse himself. He tried to cajole stilted conversation out of Chris, who obliged, but only just so, in the stiff, proper way a man offers small talk to strangers in an elevator but is back to looking at the glowing numbers in silence at the first available opportunity. Whether it was the fault of medicine, or guilt, or both, it was progress from punches and the frosty, awkward silences they’d shared at the RPD. He’d wear Chris down, given enough time.

At about four in the afternoon on Saturday, when the sun beat in with cheery golden insistence just before retiring to the horizon, the door to Chris’ room opened with an urgency as they both slept: Chris in his hospital gown, white with blue polka dots, and Kevin with his legs kicked over the side of his chair, fingers laced over his stomach as he nodded off into dreamland. The sound roused Kevin first and he blinked awake to a sight unexpected; a young woman, tall and pretty, who wore a black leather jacket over a t-shirt he recognized as an Alice In Chains album cover. A pair of tight black jeans torn at the knees, scuffed leather boots laced up her shins. Though her clothing screamed _I’M TOUGH DON’T FUCK WITH ME_ , everything else about her lacked that same hardness; she was Kevin’s height, eyes as blue as wildflowers, skin smattered with nut-brown freckles. She was blessed with so much rust red hair that it couldn’t decide where it wanted to drape over her shoulders, so it decided on “everywhere”. There was a certain predatory edge to her movements, an unapologetic sense of taking up space, her spine straight and shoulders held back. 

The woman’s eyes were full of urgency and worry as she scanned the room. When she came around the corner her face broke into a wide, dimpled smile, and she ran to the bedside, did everything but throw herself on top of Chris, who made a loud noise of confusion. She pulled back, inches from his face.

“Why is it always something with you?” She asked with a relieved laugh. She grabbed him in a tight, airless hug, closed her eyes as she squeezed. Kevin moved to grab her, and hustle her to safety away from Chris, but Chris just winced with a laugh and allowed the battery upon his person. “I can’t leave you alone for a single second.” She continued. “You’re like a toddler, always falling off of shit and hurting yourself.” 

Behind the redheaded woman, a small girl appeared, slight and blonde and dressed in a striped t-shirt and a pair of shorts. She wore sneakers that blinked with pink and white lights as she compressed their soles with her steps. When Kevin looked to her, the little girl waved, timid. Kevin waved back.

“You know me,” Chris said, smiled a crooked smile at the woman who refused to release him, “easily bored. Then I get into trouble. How’d you get here?”

“We were already flying out next week for the trial, so I bumped our tickets ahead.” She replied, kissed him on his forehead, straightened to a stand. As if she just now realized Kevin was even in the room, she asked Chris, “Is this your friend?”

Chris squinted at Kevin for a long, long moment. “Yeah,” he said, “we worked together at the police department. That’s Kevin Ryman.”

“Oh, I know you! You’re _the_ Kevin!” She said, effusive, with childlike excitement. 

“The Kevin,” Kevin said, and liked the sound if it. “That’s me.”

Kevin expected a handshake. When she approached, she also grabbed him into a hug, as if they’d been friends forever. She smelled like hairspray, leather, and some sort of perfume that reminded Kevin of the scent of vanilla ice cream. “I’m Claire, this klutz’s little sister. Nice to meet you.” She smiled. “Officially.”

“I… I… uh...” From behind Claire’s back, Chris glared, shook his head in dire warning, the goodwill drained from his face. _If you thought I beat you before_ , his expression said, _just try it_. Even the medicine couldn’t dull the edge of some things inborn, Kevin figured.

“And this is Sherry,” Claire continued, gestured to the little girl. Sherry seemed to naturally drift behind her, like a baby bear hidden behind its mother’s haunches for protection. “Why don’t you say hi, Sherry?”

“Hi,” the little girl said, shy and quiet. 

“Well, come here,” Chris said, and gestured the girl over, “let me take a look at the newest addition to the family.”

Sherry looked to Claire, unsure, and Claire ushered her on. She walked to the side of Chris’ bed, searched his injuries and his hospital gown with eyes that weren’t trusting, but weren’t unhappy, either. “I guess you’re my new Uncle,” she said, with the trademark over-familiarity of small children, zero filter applied. When they all laughed, her eyes tracked over them in turn, smiled as if to ask if it was her question, or something else, which was clever enough to have pleased a room of grown-ups so.

Chris laughed and spoke to her in a low, kind voice that made Sherry giggle, her mouth covered with one small hand. He asked her if she was hungry — he had some pudding they’d offered him, and he made a face to indicate how gross he’d found it. She could have it if she wanted. Sherry nodded, insistent and hungry, and made to climb on his bed. Kevin expected Chris to wiggle away, to make a face as if to signal the closeness was too much too fast, but he didn’t, and like that, they were thick as thieves, bonded over sugar and a soft bed after a long plane ride.

“Hey, Kevin,” Claire said, “can I talk to you for just a sec? Out here?”

“Sure,” Kevin said, “you good, Chris?”

“Huh?” Chris said, distracted from where Sherry was nestling in beside, Kevin already forgotten. “Oh. Yeah, go ahead.”

Kevin followed Claire into the hallway. His eyes stole a brief, deep once-over of her body; no wonder Chris turned out to be such an asshole who punched first and asked for forgiveness later if he was charged with protecting her, as big brothers were. Kevin also got the distinct idea, under Claire’s playful chiding and superhero jaunt across the country at even the sniff of bad news, maybe Chris wasn’t the protector in this dynamic. 

Claire leaned against the wall, her hands behind her back, feet crossed.

“So what happened?” She asked. “I was expecting way worse than this. They made it sound serious. Tubes and beeping machines and traction pins. Chris hasn’t ever been to the doctor under his own power… no way he’d come for a banged up wrist.”

Kevin didn’t realize he’d been distracted by the earnest blueness of her eyes until she laughed at his facial expression and said, “Well?”

“Oh,” he stammered, “sorry. It’s uh…” he scratched his head, “it’s more of a… y’know, psych… thing. He’s been havin’ a hard time since the incident.”

Claire’s mouth draped open. “His wrist… he didnt…?”

“No, no. Nothin’ like that.” Kevin said. “We were just worried about him, is all.”

Claire’s eyes became distant, downcast, and her smile faded. “We all have. But he takes tragedy really hard. Carries the weight of the world, you know. Always has.” As if she remembered something at the last moment, she looked around. “Where’s… Jess? Jessica?”

Kevin was confused for a brief second. “You mean Jill?”

“Jill,” Claire repeated, “that was it. I would have thought she’d be here.”

“Well…” Kevin trailed off. He figured he’d let Chris explain it, when Claire gleaned the meaning from his expression all the same.

“I kinda figured,” she said, with a bit of a sympathetic wince. “Kinda the way it goes, with Chris. Poor guy.”

Kevin nodded. “He said you’d come from somewhere far away, right?”

“Colorado. I’m finishing up school there, but they called me to let me know there’d been an accident. I was expecting the worst.” She peered at him. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”

Kevin remembered the state of his own face. His black eye still remained, puffy and bruised, but most of the swelling had gone down. “Oh, uh… no, nothin’ like that. Got mugged a few days ago.” He lied. “Dangerous town.”

“I bet,” she said, “you at least give ‘em some back?”

“Oh yeah,” Kevin said, “he got his licks in, but I like to think I came out the winner in this one.”

“Good,” Claire said, optimistic.

  
***

  
Kevin intended to stay for another hour or so — long enough to not seem like he was revved to get away from Chris, but he also didn’t want to overstay his welcome now Chris’ family was here to provide care. Kevin and Claire spent most of the time making jokes at Chris’ expense, which he shouldered with resigned, unamused seriousness while Sherry napped beside him, her tiny form cuddled boneless around the line of his shoulder. Claire brushed her fingers through the girl’s baby-fine blonde hair as she slept. The television still played a re-run of the Pink Panther from where Chris had changed it for her, even though Sherry was long asleep.

“She took to you easy, didn’t she?” Claire asked Chris. “Do you want me to move her?”

Chris just chuckled. “Guess so. You can leave her there. It’s okay.”

A nurse with green scrubs and her hair tied in braids came in and gave Chris another shot of clear medicine into the line in his arm — Claire asked her questions which bordered on exhaustive about dosage, timing, what it was for, the side effects — and somewhere in their conversation Chris ended up succumbing those side effects, his head leaned back, mouth parted in heavy breaths that came short of snores. 

For Kevin’s part, his conversation with Claire didn’t stop once his reason for staying did; with Chris’ buffer of threats removed, the conversation flowed thick and fast. Claire was kind and funny and easy to talk to, full of jokes and pop culture references and human interest. Kevin was an extrovert who charged his batteries on conversations like this, lost with ease in the connections between people — new people even moreso. When Kevin looked at the clock again, it was a few minutes shy of 9pm. He checked it three times in shock.

“Well,” Kevin said, grudging, and stood from his chair, “hate to do it, but it looks like I’ve overstayed my welcome. S’about that time for me. You all are good here?”

“We’re good,” Claire said. Her smile was sunny but tired. “Thanks for staying. We really appreciate it.” 

“No prob,” Kevin said, “anything to help out. You guys let me know if you need anything else, okay?”

“Sure,” she said, and returned her attention to Sherry, who smacked her lips in her sleep like a baby nursing upon her blanket, nuzzled her small, heart-shaped face against the pack of Chris’ shoulder. “Thanks, Kevin.” Then, as if unsure she should add it, “I had fun hanging out. Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

Kevin laughed. “Wouldn’t think of it. G’night.”

Kevin was about halfway home when he realized. He watched the lights dance across the back window in his cab, when the familiar weight of his wallet was missing from his pockets. He patted those pockets in sudden, horrified realization, he cursed under his breath, asked the cabbie to turn around.

“That’ll be a return trip,” the man informed him, gruff and unsympathetic. “Double fare.”

Kevin jogged back through the hospital’s hallways. The thick rubber soles of his Chuck Taylors tapped against the polished sanitized floors, and he rode the elevator up seven levels beside an elderly woman strapped into a gurney, surrounded by nurses and doctors. He departed before they did, signed in at the nurse’s station and returned to a room enrobed in dark save for a small, ambient bedside light. Kevin checked the room number — it was the correct one.

At first Kevin assumed Claire had left. Her chair was empty at Chris’ bedside where she sat a short time before. When Kevin’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and the inky shadows, he saw Claire had removed her boots, climbed into bed on the other side of her brother, ducked under his arm and was cuddled against his chest. They were all asleep, Redfield in the middle like a stabilizing rock formation. Kevin watched them for a brief moment, and he marveled at the duality of the thing; a man with fists like granite, a mind like a pointed weapon waiting to be directed at someone deserving, dogged and capable of such terrible atrocities; and that same man, soothed so by something as simple as human touch. And a cocktail of nerve medicine… but mostly love, it looked like. If only for the moment, something as simple as family, as something to love, as something to protect, had calmed him and salved his broken heart, packed all his despairing violence back inside its pumping walls. 

Maybe not something to protect and love… maybe something to protect and love _him_. Something that wouldn’t leave. 

Maybe it was as simple as that. 

The destructive power of familial instinct gone awry was a sight to behold. But here, it made Kevin feel like there was maybe hope for the man in the hospital bed. And if there was hope for him, maybe there was hope for them all.

Kevin tiptoed to the table, collected his wallet, and closed the door behind him.


	21. Everywhere You Go

Carlos entered the hangar that Monday morning at ten minutes to eight, travel mug of coffee in hand and his pack slung over his shoulder. The guys turned and all eyes were on him, even Kevin’s, though one was still swollen nearly shut. Carlos dropped his bag to the floor by his station with a heavy thump. It wasn’t unlike his first day here, all expectant glances and pointed silence.

“What’re you dipshits staring at?” Carlos asked, checking his pants. “My fly open?”

“Captain wants to talk to you,” Kennedy volunteered, “In his office.”

“Now?” Carlos asked, with a chuckle. “You serious?”

“Yeah,” Kennedy didn’t smile. “That’s what he said.”

 _Oooooohhhh_ the rest of the team jeered, as if sending a classmate to the Principal’s office of their grade school. Carlos smirked, unamused.

“I see how it is. Fuck all of you,” he said, and they laughed as he left the way he came, boots thudding on the cement floor, echoing in the space of the hangar.

Carlos wound through the hallways and around expensive desks, made the trek through security checkpoints guarded by soldiers in pressed dress uniforms, chins jutted in self-important decorum. When they let him through and he reached the correct office, Carlos knocked on the expensive-looking wooden door with hesitant knuckles and waited for a response. When none came, Carlos bounced on his heels, looked around, and raised his fist to knock again. The door opened. One of the two men from that day back in early October — the day where Carlos had awoken half-naked and half-alive in the cold white gleam of a hospital room, demanding answers and receiving only veiled threats — grimaced at him. He was an ugly man, his aspect hard and unpleasing to the eye, like it had been hewn from the side of a granite cliff. He looked unhappy to have been disturbed, the brackets around his mouth deep and frowning. The early morning light glinted off the pins and banners that studded his dark green dress uniform, the ones that signaled him as someone Very Important.

“Specialist,” the Captain said, “nice of you to show up today. Come in.”

Carlos followed. The Captain was middling-tall and of a strong, stocky build. He walked like he’d had a rod welded to his spine that kept it in perfect straight alignment, and moved with the ease of someone at least twenty years younger. The Captain circled to his chair and sat; Carlos waited, then seated himself. “Was told you needed to speak with me, sir.” Carlos said.

The Captain tapped his blunted fingertips against the wood of his desk. “You chose a hell of a day to not show up for work, Son. Fucked things up for everyone. You’ll do well to remember this isn’t a traditional job; you _have_ to be here.”

“Personal issues,” Carlos admitted, “they’re settled now. Won’t happen again.”

“The world doesn’t stop turning for your personal life, Specialist,” the Captain retorted, sharp and without pity, “these personal issues wouldn’t have anything to do with your teammate Ryman’s busted mug, would they? He was gone the same day.”

“Yes, they did, sir. Someone hurt him pretty bad. Didn’t want to just leave him.”

The Captain gestured to Carlos’ face. “Looks like someone got you pretty good too, right there. You two wouldn’t be starting your own private boxing club and not inviting the rest of us, would you?”

“No, sir. Nothing like that.”

“Hm.” The man sat back, rested his hands in his lap. His shoulders shifted under the thick, rugged material of his uniform coat, deep brown-green like bog moss. The Captain regarded Carlos with a tilted head, and it didn’t strike Carlos as a particularly kind sort of regard; it felt more like looking for a weak spot to stick a knife. “I’ve been looking at your file. You served in the Corps for eight years. Made it to E-5. Then with Umbrella for… two, was it?”

“Yes, sir.” Carlos nodded. He’d stayed in for two of his teenage years and most of his twenties, fucking around and being promoted not for love of rank or aplomb, but because of entropy. He was decent at his job, cool with everyone, but didn’t really try for more, kept his head down and tried to not fuck up too bad if he could help it. After those eight years, Umbrella was a blessing — rigid enough to keep him on task, but without the decorum and red tape of traditional service, former of which always made him feel like a massive prick. Just blowing shit up and being a part of a team, drinking and rabble-rousing, collecting his check and going home. 

“I’ll be frank with you, Specialist. I’ve been hearing… interesting things about your performance in the field. We’ve interviewed your teammates — you know what they said about you?”

Carlos was silent. The man shuffled a folder of papers, spread them with a dramatic, ominous flair on his desk, and Carlos imagined the crawl of unemployment lines, reams of food stamp applications.

The Captain cleared his throat. “Never gets in anyone’s way, never involved in bullshit. Always willing to help out. Good guy.” The man’s eyes flicked up to Carlos, as if waiting for a response. He shuffled the papers again. “Knows his shit but isn’t a know-it-all about it. Knows more about bioweapons than anyone else on the team.” Another shuffle. “I don’t know much about him personally but he seems okay. The guys rely on him.” One more shuffle. “I wasn’t sure about him at first but he’s a great asset to the team.” The man looked up again, to Carlos’ face, which was now confused. “On and on like this. Seems like you’ve made a good impression. Given your glowing reviews, I’m curious why you thought abandoning your squad was appropriate for the welfare of one person.”

“He needed help,” Carlos said, “team needs everyone firing on all cylinders, sir.” 

“So would you think it’s accurate to say you view yourself as having to take care of your team, then? Just you? They can’t look after themselves?”

“No,” Carlos said. The guy was starting to piss him off, twisting his words and making him sound stupid. “But when they can’t, we don’t just leave ‘em. We’re a team for a reason.”

“Well, oorah to that, Specialist,” the Captain said, with a sense of satisfaction that bordered on smugness, like he was the one who’d given a particularly good answer to the question, or was claiming Carlos’ as his own. “Glad to see I made the right call.”

“I don’t follow, sir.”

“Your team needs a fire leader, but it requires at least an E-6 rank, given the logistics.” Carlos felt relief; they’d been without an acting superior officer on operations, and all the disorganization that followed would get cleared up in a hurry. An E-6 would lend some stability. As soon as the relief came, it was gone.

“We’re promoting you from your last enlisted rank. You’re now an E-6, with all the raises that entails, except you’re strictly under the purview of the FBC, not the Department of the Navy.”

Carlos blinked, frozen in shock. He felt like a man balancing a bunch of different-sized boxes as he wavered and tried to keep the pile from tipping; just as soon as you’d gotten the hang of the weight of your pile, another one dropped on top, fucked the whole thing up.

“I’m still maintaining control over the team, but you’ll be the fire squad leader for field operations — the men will report directly to you, and you to me. Questions?”

Carlos was certain the Captain was mistaken, that his file had gotten somehow mixed up with someone else’s. “I… I’m honored, but I didn’t apply for a promotion, sir. I think Kennedy—”

“This isn’t a democracy, son,” the Captain laughed, gentle and pitying. The soft sound belied his hard face.”Kennedy’s twelve years old with no military experience, barely has hair on his nuts. And we need an experienced leader in the field who won’t get our entire squad wiped the fuck out. There were two men on the squad with prior enlisted time. You, and Rawls.” Keith. “And now there’s just you. Moreover, you don’t get a vote, even if it’s for one of your teammates. Do you think you know better than me who should lead _my_ team?”

“No, sir.”

“So why are you arguing, Staff Sergeant?”

Carlos didn’t have an answer.

“Congratulations. Now don’t call in again unless it’s to tell me someone died. I’ll make the announcement later on today, so enjoy the goodwill of your teammates while you’ve still got it. They may like you now but when you’re bringing the hammer down that’ll slip quick. Are you going to be needing sanctioned time off in the next year? Some sort of…” his eyes traced Carlos, over his dark skin and kinky hair, “religious or cultural holiday, birthdays? Speak now or hold your peace when the time comes.”

Carlos was quiet, a lump in his chest like a bite of food he hadn’t chewed enough. Then, Carlos stammered, “My, uh…” 

The Captain looked at him, his glance more pointed as the seconds ticked by.

“Gonna be having a kid.” Carlos finished. “December, maybe January.”

The man was still, staring at him. “Well, hell. You told the team?”

“No, sir. Just found out a few days ago. Still getting my head around it myself.”

Then, the man laughed, a smile of straight white teeth split his red, shining face. “You work quick, son. When’d we see each other, October? That’s when we talked about the Zombie Girl, wasn’t it?”

Carlos just stared at him. _Talked about_ her like they’d just had beers at a bonfire on a beach somewhere, not threatened her fucking life to get Carlos to do what he wanted. Carlos entertained a sudden, vivid fantasy of leaping across the desk, pulling that pine-green jacket over the Captain’s head, turning his ribs into chalkdust. Carlos wasn’t so loyal to the idea of the Corps that he didn’t mind whooping some officer ass to show who he really _was_ loyal to when provoked. Years in the brig be damned.

_Zombie Girl._

“Her name’s Jill.” Carlos said. Then, with all the venom her new moniker deserved, “ _Sir_.” 

“Huh. You and her, hey?” The man said. “Well, she’s not bad looking. Congratulations.”

It didn’t make Carlos any less pissed — if anything, the backhanded attempted at a compliment made it even worse. _Hey, congrats on knocking up the not-ugly Zombie Girl. You could have stuck your dick in worse!_

Fucking prick.

“Alright, enough bullshit,” the Captain said, Carlos’ plight already forgotten, “get downstairs and don’t say anything. They probably suspect, but it has to come from us officially. Dismissed.”

When the announcement came down that afternoon, delivered by the man himself while they stood around their table, Carlos expected a fucking mutiny. It had been less than a year and Uncle Sam had appointed the Umbrella stooge to lead the survivors of the city his old boss had cleaned out. He expected walkouts and protests and strife, maybe a solid sock in the mush or two. He probably deserved it.

None came. All he received were mumbles of assent peppered through the silence, pats on the back, murmured congratulations and little comments that told him they figured that’s why the brass was asking. Kennedy was quiet as a nun, focused on his work. 

“Put these on your uniform,” the Captain mumbled, and passed Carlos a small cardboard box lined with some sort of black, fuzzy material. When Carlos opened it, two patches, scarlet red with gold embroidered stripes over a pair of crossed rifles, stared back at him.

“How’s that for some bullshit?” Kevin asked once the Captain had departed, and the men around the table laughed. Kevin clapped Carlos on one of his large shoulders. “You deserve it, dude.”

“Good luck with this fucking dumpster fire, Sarge!” Came a cry from across the table, and they laughed again. 

“Hey, quit that shit,” Carlos warned, and Kevin pushed him. “Nothing’s changed, not as far as I’m concerned. And don’t call me Sarge.”

But it was a fool’s errand — everything had changed, and Carlos supposed now he would have to change with it, as well as he could. He watched the men around the table while they talked and cut up and threw light pieces of garbage at each other, same as any other day. Being responsible for them in an official capacity was scary, of course. But as the shock wore off, it was replaced with a sort of solemn optimism, and he pledged to them, silently, to do the best he could.

Then, in a turn of remembrance as unexpected as it was sudden, Carlos wondered if Captain Viktor would have been proud of him.

***

Carlos didn’t have long to mentally adjust to his new station. That Sunday morning at about 3 am, his phone rang, rattling against his bedside table like the banging of a screen door in a particularly strong wind. It jolted Jill awake, and she moaned and rubbed at her eyes while Carlos had a short, stilted conversation with the man on the other end of the line, the broad of his upper back slatted with moonlight that peeked from the spaces between the window-blinds. 

“Yessir. When? …understood. I’ll make contact.” She watched him climb out of bed and make a series of calls that were equally short, all with the same details. 

“Listen to you,” she said, and he turned to her like he thought she was asleep and her voice had startled him, “doing fancy NCO things with your fancy NCO patches.”

“Just a fire team leader,” he said, “I know I make it hard to control yourself, but… don’t get too excited. This time, anyway.”

Carlos spoke and fell into joking with his trademark ease, but his movements were short, unsure, and he forgot a certain few items more than once, having to cross the room over and over to retrieve them. Jill tilted her head. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. …kind of.” Carlos said. “Little nervous. Just first-day shakes, it’ll pass.”

“Just shows that you’re taking it seriously,” she said, “you’ll do fine. Just be yourself.” She watched him dress, the blue-purple shadows casting the carved lines and dips of his body in stark, hard, black reliefs. “Have I ever told you that I’m jealous?”

Carlos looked up to her from where he knelt, cinched the laces of his boots with the sharp whizz of fabric. “I wouldn’t be. I told you I work with Kevin, right?”

Jill smiled. “…that’s a good point, actually. But I’m serious. Just reminds me of getting to go into the field, I guess.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll be out there makin’ ‘em sorry again soon enough. You deserve some time to—”

“—rest. I know, I know.”

Carlos laughed, a soft puff of air through his nose. “Startin’ to sound like a broken record, huh.”

“Maybe a little bit.” 

They fell into a companionable silence, and Jill watched him rifle through the gear in his bag, checking to make sure everything was present and intact. She laid back down. He tried his best to be quiet, but Carlos was as quiet as a bull at the best of times; if he wasn’t clomping around in heavy boots and opening every cupboard and door in the apartment, he was talking to himself, making stupid jokes, knocking his head on things and cursing. But now, he was tiptoeing as best he could.

Carlos leaned over her, and the mattress bowed and creaked under his weight. “I’m gonna roll out. You wanna come lock the door?”

Jill extended a hand. He grabbed it and pulled her to her feet. She followed him, rubbing her eyes. 

It was 3 am and Jill was tired and sore, not given to deep philosophical thought or introspection in hours such as these. But watching _his_ nervousness made _her_ nervous, knowing his chances of making a mistake leapt up by exponents. It was more than a feeling of fear; something had changed that early morning, a subtle but clear difference between when she’d fallen asleep and when she woke. Now it wasn’t just intellectual — it was real, and it felt like she was watching her heart walk around outside of her chest, soft and imminently vulnerable. Open to damage. It was a strange, sudden emotional pressure that gave her pause. She reached out and touched his arm, just over the new patch, still stiff and freshly stitched to the corded sleeve of his black fatigues. He turned to look at her.

“Be careful,” she said, “come back safe. Okay?”

Carlos smiled, tired and wan, and after a moment’s consideration, pulled her into an embrace. She stood there as long as he would let her, sucked up his smell and his closeness and his voice like parched soil sucked up rainwater, unsure when it would see it next. 

“What’s the best thing about Switzerland?” He asked, against the mussed brush of her hair.

Jill blinked. “What?” She asked.

“Well, the flag’s a big plus.”

Jill pulled away, sharp and fast, and glared at him, but was unable to fight back a smile. “You’re the worst. Just the absolute worst.”

“I know. I’ll keep practicing.” Carlos kissed her on her temple, and as he pulled away, he touched her stomach in a brief, gentle caress. It was a simple gesture, maybe even absentminded on his part — he didn’t comment further or make a show of his touches, but Jill felt them. Felt them very clearly. 

Then he turned, walked down the stairs, loaded his bag in his car, and pulled away.

Jill closed the door, clicked the lock. She stood there in the darkness, thinking. They’d been through so many dramatic overtures, so many end-of-the-world scenarios, so many things that — if you were in a movie, or something — undoubtedly proved the way one person felt about another. Character revealers, shown but never told. But that morning, she thought about the strange, simple way he’d tried to move so quietly so she could sleep. How he’d tried to console her, like it was her going out into the field on foreign soil before the crack of dawn. How he’d given her a goodbye, not content to leave without holding her, and then that stupid joke…

Jill caught herself smiling, despite herself. She knew that pressure in her chest, that reaction to a him-shaped hole as soon as he’d departed. 

“God damn it,” she said. Then, quietly, “fuck.”

There were complications in that relationship of show-don’t-tell. New jobs and deployments and pregnancies and trials. All very heavy things. But, irrevocable as some of them were, king among all these was love: the ultimate complication, and the only one with the power to change every single one of the others. Turn it to something different and beautiful. Or something terrifying, as she was learning in the deep jeweled hues of dawn.

Jill returned to the bedroom and attempted, unsuccessfully, to sleep. After two hours of tossing and turning, despite her exhaustion, she rose with the early morning sun and sat on the living room couch, watching the news. She eventually slumped over its arm in a heavy doze, and slept while the pretty blonde woman on the set spoke in grave, clipped tones about next week’s upcoming Congressional trial.


	22. Land of Confusion

May 21, 1999  
Somewhere outside Baños de Agua Santa, Ecuador

  
The day started early in the vaulting brightness of an airport terminal. A flight from DC to Atlanta; then a connection they almost missed from Atlanta to Lima, Peru; then one more flight to a city named Quito inside the tight, insular borders of their final destination: Ecuador.

Quito was a city of stark whites shot through with black and terra cotta buildings piled around one central hill like worshipers upon their prayer cloths. Exhausted and jet-lagged, the team wandered outside in the baking heat to a bus terminal, where a team of two men were waiting. One of the men spoke broken English and the other none at all, both with skin as dark and shining as ochre, black eyes and wide, pale yellow smiles. They had a truck like someone would move house in, barren save for two benches on each side of the dingy white interior, studded with racing light rows of thick metal bolts that held the box of the truck together. The air was still and wet, heavy with the smell of sweat and dirt and stale paint. They sat on the benches, jostled and rocked by every strut of root, every chunk of rock under the truck’s tires as they rambled down the wide, single dirt road that led away from the city.

Carlos wanted to speak but couldn’t find the right words. He didn’t want to sound like a fuckhead, recalled the young officers who’d spin by OCS for a few months then come back fully aware of the echelon of importance they’d been ushered into, with new speaking cadences and old biases, both wielded like weapons. Then he thought of Captain Viktor — Mikhail. To get him started, he tried to channel the old Tank, how he’d talk to his crew like they already knew what they were doing and just needed the gaps filled in, would go from there. It was worth a shot.

“Alright,” Carlos said, “you guys’ve been to the jungle before, right?”

They turned their heads to him, their eyes meeting in silent questions. Head shakes in the negative met Carlos’ question.

“No big deal. Okay, huddle close,” he said. They leaned in, a parliament of sweat-sheened bodies and white faces already pink from the heat in the air, upper lips wet and hair limp under the moisture. Carlos gave a brief rundown of the problematic wildlife, mostly bugs and spiders; the need for venom extractors to stay nearby and in good working order; the need to tie back or cover your hair to protect from ticks. 

“Sounds like god damned Jumanji,” one man said.

“So here’s what’s going on,” Carlos said, unfolding a plastic map. “There’s a city called Baños de Agua Santa — real tourist trappy kind of place. Supposedly sacred ground. Right outside Baños,” he indicated a thatch mark on the map with a point of his finger, “are small villages, miles between 'em at a time. Umbrella’s got a medical clinic for poor communities out there. Opened it to combat the AIDS epidemic, back in '93 when it was real bad in South America. Quiet, not much comes out of there.”

“But now it ain’t so quiet?” Kevin asked.

“Or it’s too quiet.” Kennedy said.

“Bingo,” Carlos continued, “Uncle Sam’s ordered ‘em to fork over their medical records dating back to ‘93, but they’ve been radio silent ever since. Locals’ve been no help. We’re supposed to go in and take the records, or document that there aren’t any and bring back any employees we find.”

“They’re expecting trouble, clearly.” Kennedy said, tilting his head and squinting at the map. “Are they thinking a bioweapon leak, or…?”

“Not sure what we’re gonna find,” Carlos said, “but they couldn’t risk sending in the military, or it’d look like an act of war. So it’s on us to find out what happened. These guys’ll take us as close to the basin as they can, then it’s a trek through about two days of rainforest to get there.”

“Pff. They want trouble, I got some they can have.” Kevin said. 

“So it’s mostly data collection,” Kennedy said.

“We’re hopin’.” Carlos finished. “But we gotta be ready for anything, knowing these fuckers.”

The truck stopped some hours later. They paid the drivers and baby-stepped in single file down a steep, grassy hill. Carlos pulled down a vine and it cracked in his hand, and once they entered the jungle, it was like entering a magic doorway into a children’s story, all green finery and filtered light and alien noises. They walked and walked and walked, hacking at obstacles with machetes, covered in sweat almost as soon as they’d touched feet onto the fertile peat. Some hours in, a large cat with gleaming yellow eyes and a jet black coat sat by the path, watching them. Carlos encouraged them to just ignore it and walk behind him, but never to run — they didn’t think you were food until you acted like food, and food ran. The team trailed after him, with slow, paranoid steps. The cat flicked at a bug with its ear and turned its curious head to watch them pass, then left without fanfare, having had its fill of its new guests.

The trip took just over two days on foot. They took breaks for water and sleep and food under tangles of mosquito nets, never stopping for more than two hours at a time before pressing forward. Clouds of curious black flies and vibrating mosquitoes followed them, held at a grudging distance by acrid coatings of bug spray. At one point the overhead canopy shook and they readied their weapons at the commotion. The chittering of monkeys squeaked from a branch, and then was gone in a flurry of freed leaves that drifted down like feathers. The noise spooked a nearby tarantula the size of Carlos’ fist, which spun in place on a tree trunk just inches from Kevin’s face, then skittered away to the safety of the forest floor. “JESUS!” Kevin screamed in surprise, and they laughed at him.

“Gonna make it?” Carlos patted Kevin on the back, and Kevin jumped again.

“It’s official,” Kevin lifted his black baseball cap, smoothed his dark auburn hair down against his head, and pulled the hat back over his forehead until it fit snug. “I hate the jungle. How’s Canada this time of year? Anyone know?”

A chorus of jeering mumbles sounded as they passed Kevin in a line, stopped to playfully shove at him or pull his hat down over his eyes. “Hey, don’t pretend like you love this shit either, fuckers.” He followed after, rifle pointed at the ground. 

As much as they fucked with Kevin, as much as they poked fun and laughed at his plights at the best of times, it was his sharp eyes and powers of observation that brought a single, sobering fact to the fore when their trip was almost through, near dusk on the second day. Kevin wiped his face, squinted around, screwed his mouth to the side, then asked:

“So… Where the fuck did all the animals go? I don’t even hear bugs.”

Kennedy made a sudden sound of surprise, a _whap_ , and then an exclamation of disgust. He held out his hand; on the vented black leather of his glove, the body of a mosquito twitched and shook in its death throes. The insect was the size of Kennedy’s hand, stretched edge-to-edge; one of its eyes was bulbous and milky and huge, almost the size of a large marble, the side of its body caved out to make room for the heft of it. Out of the monstrous lump on the side of its body, another set of four long, thread-spindly legs snatched and clawed at the air in impotent desperation, as if another animal entirely was trying to crawl out of the mosquito’s carapace. Kennedy made another noise of fear, and shook his hand like a cat that had stepped on a strip of tape until the dead insect’s body dislodged from him and fell to the floor with a gentle tap.

“We’re getting close,” Carlos said, “gotta be.”

“Doesn’t look good,” Kevin said, and stomped on the bug, scraped his boot on the jungle floor.

Carlos moved ahead of the unit by a handful of paces, scanning the ground for traps or tripwires. The edge of the treeline presented itself, the huge, gnarled root systems becoming occasional and then petering out completely. He crouched, and peeked out from behind a massive tree, its bark clustered with dead white fungi that hung in a peeling linoleum curtain. The unit crept up behind Carlos and hunkered down. 

“Holy shit,” Kevin said, as he peered down the sights of his rifle. “What the fuck is that…?”

Carlos unfolded his binoculars and looked. The medical center was tiny by American standards. When compared to the sprawling, mirrored multiplexes that housed Emergency Rooms back home, it was downright pitiful. Perhaps the size of a small grocery store. It was built from grey cement, with a curling dirt drive-up that lead from, and to, the only road that Carlos could see, down the hill about half a mile. There were no parking spaces; you dropped someone off here and left. No sleepovers. A plastic sign with an illustration of a flying dove, branch of leaves in its beak hung over the door: 

**Nuestra Señora de los Dolores**   
**Fundado 1993**

Carlos looked to the right to where Kevin gestured his attention. A pit had been dug into the dirt, the size of a large swimming pool. In it was nothing — nothing but three or four black tactical shovels, left buried point-down in the pit or thrown to its side.

“Someone’s cleaning up a mess,” Kennedy said. “A big one. I’m turning on my bodycam.”

“Good idea,” Carlos said, and switched his on as well. The rest of the men in the unit followed suit. 

“I got the heebie jeebies just standing here,” said one of the other men, “something’s fucky, Heavy.”

Kennedy took out his camera and began to silently snap photos. He took twenty if he took one, then messed with the handset of his recorder. They sat, sweating in the bush, wiping away wetness from their foreheads and their upper lips. Carlos peered up to the canopy. Without the animals, without the everpresent chitter of insects and small birds, something ominous and dark swept over the trees, even though the sun dappled through the emerald green boughs with as much cheer as he’d ever seen, sending spinning spots of light onto the soil like a huge disco ball. 

“How long does it take to send that to control?” Kevin asked. “I’m sweating bullets over here.”

“Backing it up,” Kennedy said, “the signal’s weak. Give me two more minutes.” The team waited. A drop of sweat pooled on the sharp point of Kennedy’s nose, then fell to the hot floor below. Even under the heat that turned his pale skin boiling pink and his hair a sweaty tumble, Kennedy was one of those guys that couldn’t be ugly if he tried, all chiseled angles and full lips; even the way he looked confused and serious at his computer equipment looked like he was smoldering for a photo, rather than plunked into the lurid humidity of the Ecuadorian jungle. Even a two-day trek didn’t ugly him up. Carlos might have been a touch envious at the lack of upkeep this indicated. Then, Kennedy said, “Its gone. We’re good.” 

Kevin looked around. After a moment to survey, he crouched beside Carlos. “You sure this is the place? Looks abandoned to me.”

“Me too,” Carlos agreed. His eyes drifted back over to the pit, the black shovels thrown to the side. “Someone made a pit to bury or burn something but didn’t get the chance. Let’s hope it is and make this quick.”

As they approached the door, a large, silver-colored logo — an umbrella, its points reaching in every direction — was built into the cement entrance floor like a star on the walk of fame, scuffed almost smooth from years of foot traffic, dirt ground into the corners and the textures. 

“Of fuckin’ course,” one of the men said, “always so proud of their stupid fucking logo.” He spat on it.

“Kennedy,” Carlos said, and Kennedy was already behind him, readying to snap photos. The remaining four men followed after him, scanning the place, guns at the ready while he worked.

While they did so, Carlos drifted to a large poster tacked to the hospital’s front window, behind a shield of protective glass, its colors faded and stolen by the abusive South American sun. It had a picture of a woman, smiling down at a small child while the child washed her tiny hands in a basin, soap frothed up to her wrists. _Las manos limpias son manos felices!_ It declared. Then, below, in Portuguese, it repeated the same. Below that, some sort of European language he couldn’t place. Then, finally, in English, _Clean hands are happy hands!._

“Bet your hands are real happy right now,” Carlos mumbled. 

“What’s it say?” Kevin asked, and stopped beside him. Spanish was close enough to Portuguese — his family’s native language, the one his mother had insisted on speaking at home his entire life, and would smack at him with a sandal if he tried to speak English instead — that Carlos could take an educated guess on what it meant.

“What, the sign? It’s in Spanish, but… Our Lady of… Sadness? Pain? Something like that.” He said. “Sounds like fun.”

“Wait,” Kevin said, nonplussed, “you don’t speak Spanish?”

“Nah. Do you?”

“You’re fuckin’ with me. I thought you were Mexican?”

Carlos thought it was a joke, but Kevin’s confused expression told him otherwise. “Oh yeah?” Carlos stilled his face, raised an eyebrow. “Well, I ain’t. That a problem?”

Kevin’s earnest expression became embarrassed, panicked. “Oh. I uh — sorry, man, I just thought you all knew, well…”

“What do you mean ‘ _you all_ ’?”

“Don’t be like that. I just thought… you know...”

“I’m fuckin’ with you.” Carlos laughed. “I don’t care.”

Kevin let out a breath, wiped his forehead with his arm. The reddish-brown hair on his arm was slicked flat with sweat. “Man, fuck you.” He said. 

Carlos tapped Kevin’s nose from the underside, made his face tip up with a jolt of surprise. It was then Kennedy and the others returned. The team waited for him to do his evidence-collecting computer magic a final time, leaned against the pillars and the walls. 

“Sorry guys,” Kennedy apologized, jabbing at the controls, “shouldn’t be much… there. All good.”

“Alright,” Carlos said, “check your gear, safeties off. I don’t gotta tell you how to handle this shit so I’m not gonna pretend I do. Get in, get out.”

“You said it,” one of the men said, “I’m ready to get back in some fuckin’ AC. And a beer.”

“Hey, hey wait—” Kennedy said, and held up a hand. “You smell that?”

They stopped and looked at him.

“Blood?” Kevin said. 

Kennedy nodded. “It kind of smells… sweet. Do you smell it?”

Carlos nodded as well. Kennedy was a full-grown man, only two handfuls of years younger than he, but plain as day, Carlos could see him sopping up the lessons and the teachings, applying them to the missions with studious intent. It made Carlos feel like maybe this gig wasn’t going to be such a hard sell, after all. 

“Yup,” he said, “good call. Behind me. Lets get it done and get back home ASAP.” 

With that, Carlos led them through the blue-black of the front door, and into the unknown that lay beyond.

  
***

May 21, 1999  
Washington, D.C.

  
That morning, after the morning news had subsided its incessant chatter and before lunchtime, Jill’s phone rang. The tiny device beeped out an electronic version of the reveille horns that were such a terrible thing during her stint in the Army, the ones they played every morning at wakeup. It was annoying and strident but that was the point — it never let her sleep. She groaned and leaned over, checked the caller ID. She didn’t recognize the number. 

“Hello?” She said, and leaned back against the couch.

“Good morning. I’m looking for Jill Valentine. This is Captain Harris of the Federal Bioterrorism Commission.”

“Oh!” Jill said, in surprise, and sat up. “Good morning, sir. How are you?”

“Just fine,” he said, “I’m calling because Doctor Behara told me you were looking for opportunities to help the Commission. Considering your resume, we’ve much to discuss. Do you have time today to come down?”

“Of course,” Jill said, her chest filled with excitement. “Absolutely. What time would be best for you?”

“I think three should be fine,” he said, “do you have a pen so you can write the directions down?”

Jill knew the area well. It was down the street from the compound where she’d been treated by the same people; a bad memory, and returning to that place left a bad taste in her mouth, like returning to the scene of a crime where you’d been victimized. But her personal feelings didn’t matter, outstripped with the brisk energy of optimism and hope. When she hung up, she, perhaps out of instinct, turned to call for Carlos, to tell him the good news. When she realized he wasn’t there, it was a strange wilting feeling, some of the victory diminished. 

***

When Jill Valentine presented to Harris’ office that afternoon, his first shock was just how petite she was. She was slender and compact, and even though she wore a pair of sensible low heels and he was only a humble five-foot-ten, she was short enough that he had to look down to her by degrees. They shook hands, hers of delicate size, but of a grip deceptively sturdy against his. If he hadn’t seen the evidence for himself, he’d have called you a liar when you’d told him this was _the_ Jill Valentine of infamy; she looked better suited to some sort of sport where her diminutive size wouldn’t have been a drawback. Definitely not some sort of Larger Than Life action hero.

“Miss Valentine, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said, “finally.”

“The pleasure’s all mine,” she said, with a warm smile. It lit her face from within. “Thank you, Captain.”

“Of course. Please, sit.”

He offered her coffee, which she declined, but she did accept a glass of water. 

“So,” he said, “you said you wanted to help our operations, specifically where they pertain to Umbrella.”

“That’s right,” she agreed. 

“But you’re set to testify before the Congressional committee next week, are you not?”

“That’s correct.”

“Hm. Well, your testimony is what’s important at this juncture,” the Captain said, “and we expect it to take some time. Cutting off the head of the Hydra, as it were. But after that’s over and done with, we’d be glad to have you aboard, so consider this your offer letter.” He paused. “Now… there is some concern about fraternization, as its come to my attention that one of our soldiers in a position of command and yourself have a history pertaining to the incident in Raccoon City. We’ve had some discussions of your safety in the past, and I don’t think he’d be able to command you in an impartial manner.” To Jill’s confused tilt of her head, he said, “I’m sure he’ll know what I’m talking about. So field operations would be out, of course, at least on my team. But intelligence would be perfect, if you’re so inclined.”

“Yes,” she said, “any way I can help, I will. Intelligence, field operations — I’m here to be used however I can be.”

“So,” he said, and leaned forward with his elbows against the desk, “tell me some ways you can help us.”

Valentine’s eyes, somewhere between gray and the brightest blue he’d ever seen, became solemn. Any shred of a smile of her face died to embers.

“I have eyewitness testimony,” she said, “hard evidence. Files collected. Suicide notes from Umbrella mercenaries. Photos. Virus samples. My blood is evidence, in and of itself. Everything I have or will have is pledged to destroy them for what they’ve done. And if I can serve as a conduit for your Commission doing so, everything I’ve got is yours. But more than that -- I know how they work. I know who they are, and I know how to cut them down where they need to be. Just point me in the right direction, and they’re as good as a crater in the ground. I promise you that.”

The Captain smiled and suddenly, in a great rush, came around to understanding the many infatuations that seemed to hover around her like a perfume. She was pretty enough, sure; but her intensity was what grabbed and shook you. Even now, with all he knew, he felt its fingers curling around the core of him. He understood, started to believe, despite himself.

“I very much appreciate your enthusiasm.” He said. “I’m glad you came forward. This will be an amazing stabilizing force to our operations. I think we can do great things together.”

Valentine responded with a genuine rush of agreement, of thanks, and at the hope in her face, he almost felt a pang of guilt. 

Almost.

They talked a bit more about logistics; about dates and times, payscales, benefits. Convincing minutiae. Valentine finished her water, and she stood again. They said their goodbyes and shook hands. He promised to be in touch after the trial for her start date and debriefing. The Captain watched her leave, click the door politely closed behind her. After a moment, when he was sure she was gone, he fished a small clamshell phone out of the locked drawer of his desk, dialed a few numbers on the keypad. Then he leaned back in his full leather seat, enough to make it creak.

“Uh uh. She came in just now Pretty little thing, huh?” Speaking on the other end. “No, I didn’t. I pushed her off. Who do you want? Sullivan?” He pulled up to his desk, scribbled a note. “How much?” 

The Captain wrote down the dollar figure. It was more than they were paying _him_ — of course, they’d put all four of his children through school at Yale and Penn, but this was enough to retire on, for one person. He made a mental note to bring that up once this was all over. 

The man on the other end said something else. “No, no word back yet,” the Captain responded, “It should be soon, unless the jungle did our work for us. I’ll let you know when I hear something.”

The Captain hung up, and made another call. “Sullivan. I need your location. We’ve got a job for you. Get a load of this: 350 k. Yes, just for her. Yes I’m sure. Just do it, please.” 

After the conversation ceased and he clapped the phone shut, the Captain sat back with his fingers laced over his stomach. He was glad she’d swallowed the line about the testimony — it was a slick piece of off-the-cuff misdirection on his part, given she wouldn’t be around to _give_ testimony, either way it went. Any jerkoff could have orchestrated that, but the counter-terrorism team was the real gem; he’d sent them on enough hunts to prop up their confidence, even elected an actual leader, before dancing them into the waiting arms of Umbrella’s clean-up team. Nobody would question if they’d run into too much trouble. That was the real beauty of recruiting people who’d lost everything — nobody would come looking. MIA, KIA, it was all the same in the end. Except this time, KIA netted him about 75 thousand dollars a head. It was steep, even by Umbrella’s standards, but every other avenue had failed, and they were on the defensive, desperate to avoid a surprise at trial. A real two for one fire sale.

The Captain paused for thought, brief and regretful. But then justification took hold. It wasn’t his fault this was how the world worked; he was just doing his best to survive. Nobody could fault him that, surely. And if they did, well, chances are he could pay them to not. It hadn’t failed him yet.

The Captain lit the thick brown tube of a cigar he’d stored his desk for special occasions just like this one, took a deep drag, and daydreamed of what he’d spend it all on.


	23. 86

May 21, 1999  
Washington, D.C  
4:35pm

They sat in the silence of a parked car, eating take-out burgers and sipping at milkshakes that had long since become tepid and separated in the heat. Their trip had started out with excited tension. A readiness, the energy of a shared enemy. Over the hours, the high May sun climbed and hung and then began its descent, had taken that pointed aggressive optimism with it. Now it just felt like wasted time. Reynolds hated wasting time.

The women in tan waitress uniforms they’d watched walk to restaurants in early morning were now returning back the way they came, their stringed red aprons in hand. The businessmen who’d made their ways down the sidewalks in important peacock struts with cell phones held to their ears were trudging, loosening their neckties, shoulders slumped in defeat.

And still no sign of her.

“Maybe she went another way,” Sullivan said, turning the last quarter of her hamburger to look for an edge that didn’t look wilted, soaked with grease. She gave up, tossed it into the paper take-out bag with a puff of disgust. “May have missed her.”

Reynolds shook his head. His strawberry blonde hair was clipped close in a short, businesslike style, but he never managed to pull off the image of the consummate professional he tried for; he always seemed to look a little more like a stand-up comedian than anything respectable or fearsome. The hours in the pre-summer sun had baked his fair complexion around the edges, darkened his freckles. 

“I’d know her,” he said, “from a thousand paces, I’d know her.”

“Oh yeah?” Sully said, and it was less of a question than it was an air-filler. They sat in silence.

“So how are we splitting the 200k?” Reynolds asked. He kept his tone still, conversational.

“I figure 100k for you, 100k for me,” Sullivan shrugged. “Seems fair. We get double if we get her to take the check and not 86 her, though. We should do that.”

The argument was long-worn and tired, but Sullivan was a bulldog, and she shook it like one. Reynolds looked aside at her — her blonde hair, tied up in a ponytail, her face too severe to be considered pretty by conventional standards. She rested the knuckles of her fist against her mouth as she watched the people. 

200k. She had said 200k, again. The first time wasn’t a mistake.

“You don’t know her,” Reynolds said, “I do. You’re not getting her to take that check.”

“I can,” Sullivan responded, unconcerned. “I can be pretty persuasive.”

Reynolds dropped it. She’d just have to see for herself.

She had said 200k, though. Not 350k. Of that he was certain.

***

They hadn’t offered Jill a car. The last time, they’d offered her a car. She found that strange, but didn’t think much of it until later that night. 

Dr. Behara had offered her a car.

Jill began her walk home — well, not _home_ , but home to Carlos’ apartment, empty and silent as a tomb. It wasn’t very far — perhaps an hour, hour and a half on foot. She’d agreed to stay there until the court proceedings had wrapped up, for her own safety. But, she reasoned, this was important. A single walk or two hidden in the shuffle of the D.C foot traffic in broad daylight wouldn’t kill her. She had the benefit of hiding in plain sight, along with thousands of other people. Being cooped up in that apartment brought back bad memories of not being able to leave. She was glad for the walks, when she found a reason to take them. 

Jill passed all manners of delis, small churches packed onto street corners, small coffee shops whose smell normally would have enticed her and intoxicated her brain, but now just made her feel vaguely queasy. The people around her were talking on their phones, to each other, or walking in silence, ears blocked by circular foam phones that pumped music.

Something felt off. Jill felt eyes everywhere. The feeling crept up her body like rising water, cold and shimmering. The sea of bodies became less like a place to hide and more like a crushing tide, hot and thick and smelling like perfume and heat and laundry detergent and cigarette smoke, suddenly claustrophobic. She didn’t have anywhere to move if she needed to. No space to dodge or juke or get away. Nobody was looking at her — she swung her head around, looking for the source of that feeling. The Eyes. None were pointed at her, but she felt them on her back, against the standing hairs on her neck all the same. It became hard to breathe. Her heart hammered inside her chest, like a knock on a door.

Jill broke through the side of the column of people and detoured away from the sidewalk. “Hey, _watch it_!” Someone yelled, but she didn’t turn to look, continued through the gates of a nearby park. Its immense black wrought-iron fences stood open, a wide gravel path winding deep into its ferns and tree boughs and flowering bushes like a gray tongue. Jill stopped beside a dirt expanse that held a display of greenish-pink succulents, hands on her knees, and tried to catch her breath. It stopped somewhere above the meridian of her lungs, puffing in and out but never making it easier to breathe, her chest tight. Footsteps behind her, crunching the gravel underfoot. Jill steeled herself and turned to a young woman pushing an expensive-looking baby stroller. The woman said hello and passed by. 

Jill put her hand on her forehead. Maybe she wasn’t ready to go outside yet. Where earlier in the day she’d hungered for open spaces, now she wanted to scramble into whatever small crack or hole she could find, feel its confines squeezing her like a hug. Telling her she was safe. That it would be okay. Jill had never yearned for safety. Had actively avoided it almost all of her life, in fact. Something in her brain was unraveling.

“Fuck,” she mumbled, and forced her legs to move, forced herself to walk. It got easier as she did it. The Eyes went away, by degrees, as if the trees and gazebos and plants were blocking her from them. A barricade. Somewhere to hide.

The park extended so far that the sun began to set before Jill reached the other side. The groups of schoolchildren with their chaperones had long since left. The joggers in their bright nylon outfits had all passed, thumped against the path, and were gone. Now it was just Jill and the gravel and the trees and the purple-yellow of the fading sun. The walk was long and she was tired, but that unraveling had been burned from her brain.

On a bench up ahead, two lovers sat engaged in conversation that managed to be enthusiastic and shy all at once. A young man with his arm around a woman’s shoulders, the woman with her knees together, tilted towards him as she talked. Jill ducked her head and quickened her pace, not wanting to look the interloper on a position so far from the front entrance they had surely sought to give them some privacy. Despite her stress, Jill smiled to herself and glanced at them again — what better time for romantic conversation than May, under the pastel sunset, surrounded by the heavy weight of blooming things?

The man was glancing back. He looked away, quickly. Without thinking, Jill’s eyes flicked to the woman — who just a moment ago was so engrossed in her man, but now also looked away from Jill, as if she had been caught doing something inappropriate. What was a charming picture of young love just a moment before twisted and swirled and turned the more Jill thought about it.

They were both young, but both wearing business suits. The woman didn’t have a purse. Nowhere to keep money or cosmetics or your phone if you were on a date. But maybe they weren’t on a date? Maybe it was an affair? Maybe it was a million other things that were none of her business? Maybe…

The feeling of The Eyes came back. Staring. Plucking at the hair on the back of her neck. Jill shook her head and her feet moved faster without her having to think much about it. She shook her head and wiped at her face. _You’re being paranoid, You’re letting your mind get the better of you. Turn the station, like your therapist told you. Just turn the stat—_

“Excuse me,” the young lady called out. Jill started, as if someone had just cracked off a rifle round. She turned; they were both on their feet now. Following her. “You dropped something.” The woman continued. “I’ve got it just here, if you’d like—”

“You can keep it,” Jill said, and exited the back gate of the park. She thought about running. There was no reason — young people in business suits were more common than young people in anything else, on Capitol Hill. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything.

Her feet moved faster. She turned the corner, around a flower shop with a cracked, faded sign, down the street over a large series of grates that blew air up against her from empty space. The dead marquee of a theater sat, silent and dark, and Jill scuttled under its gray lights, as if to hide in its shadows. Ahead, a yellow-and-chrome skeleton loomed. The bones of a dragon, perhaps, until her brain adjusted and saw only a construction site, as dark and sleeping as all the other landmarks in this forgotten stretch of the glittering rot.

“Hello?” The young woman called, her voice bouncing off the street, the buildings. Jill didn’t turn around. 

Jill crossed the street. After a moment, the patter of footsteps sounded behind her in the distance. Jill looked back. The woman was behind her again at so many paces. Her blonde ponytail caught a stiff wind and fluttered. Cold for May. Something in Jill’s stomach clenched at the confirmation, but also at the new information — the man was gone. There was just the woman, now.

“If I could just talk to you a moment,” the woman continued, “my phone is dead.”

“Just leave me alone, please,” Jill said, “I can’t help you.” The open, yawning stretch between two tall patches of chain-link fence invited her in, and Jill ducked between them. The scaffolding of the site stretched up to the sky. Something new and tall and grand brewing. The man slunk out from behind a piece of equipment, directly into Jill’s path, a quiet smile on his face. 

“Awfully dangerous part of town, isn’t it?” He said. As he moved, his suitcoat fluttered and he pulled it closed with a debonair gesture. It was enough movement to see; against one flat side of his dress shirt snugly sat a holstered gun. Against his other side, the brown ribbed pommel of a combat knife.

Jill backed away from him, and when the woman followed behind her, Jill backed away again, at an angle, moved herself from between them. Her eyes darted back and forth, tried to keep tabs on both at once.

“But we can help you,” the woman said. 

“I don’t have any money,” Jill lied, “I’ve got nothing on me.”

“That makes our meeting especially fortuitous, for you.” The woman said. She drew closer and Jill jerked away; the woman held out her hands in a gesture of peace. “Easy now. We’re just here to talk.”

Jill’s eyes flicked to the man — he was watching the woman, his expression unreadable.

Jill looked her up and down. “On behalf of who?”

“Sully,” he said, his voice full of warning. “We talked about this.”

The woman laughed, then gestured to him as well in that wave of _I come in peace_. “I’m sure we can come to some kind of an agree—”

A loud report, dry and echoing like a firecracker. A spray of dark, jeweled blood and shattered loops of gray matter popped out of the back of the woman’s head from the other side of a dark hole burrowed into her face, right above her left eyebrow. She touched her fingers to it, gingerly, then collapsed to the gravel and shook. Jill froze in place, her clothes and face spattered with it, salty and warm and wet.

The man looked at what he’d done, and swallowed, hard. His eyes were wide and near to bulging, his expression a look of hard consternation. When he turned a moment later to finish the job, Jill was closer. Close enough to smell her, see the color in her eyes. She slammed her elbow down into the joint of his arm and the nerves of his hand failed, fingers flying open. He dropped the gun, tried to grope for it with his other hand, but it tumbled to the gravel. Jill ducked him again, scooped it up, and removed the entire top of its gleaming chrome slide with a single, practiced movement. Threw them over the fence, and out of sight.

Jill was fast but she was also small, built strong for a woman but narrow compared to the man before her. He ate her steps with one of his own and fired a shot across her face with a fist. It jangled reality and made it puff into cancerous black spots, the teeth on the side of her mouth loosened, her face numb with the promise of later pain. He grabbed the sweater around her waist and stripped it off with a hard yank, wrapped it around her neck and stepped behind her. He had to pull and squeeze until his hands shook, but it cinched tight, cinched until the air stopped moving and Jill pawed at it, desperately tried to get her fingers under its seam.

“I told her you wouldn’t take the money,” he explained, “she wouldn’t listen.”

Jill choked and sputtered and tried to move her feet to displace him. He lifted her off the ground, against him just by an inch, but it was enough. 

“She doesn’t know you. But I do. I’ve been watching you a while. Almost like we’re frien—”

Jill groped backwards, closed her hand around leather, yanked as hard as she could. Freed it from its sheath and its snap closure. She drove the blade into the large muscle of the man’s thigh until its sharp tip chinked against the solidity of bone. The man dropped the sweater, clutched at his leg with a scream of pain, of outrage. Jill danced away from him, boots scuffing across the gravel, dust kicked into the air. She carried the knife with her, coughing and gagging and clutching her neck with her other hand. Her sweater fluttered to the ground between them, like a referee with its arms outstretched: _alright, back to your corners, let’s have a good clean fight._

“You stupid bitch,” he spat. Blood poured from the wound on his leg, wetted his pantleg dark and glistening and spilled to the ground around his dress shoe. “ _Fuck_!”

Jill’s breath returned, slow and ragged. She brandished the knife in his direction, one hand held up to its side to block incoming blows. Walked in a circle so she blocked the exit, her back to it. In her eyes, steely silver and hard and cold, there was a thread of desperation. He found himself, sudden as a thunderbolt, with no weapon, no partner, in that dangerous position where he was the only thing between her and something important, the high ground surrendered. 

For the first time in years, Tim Reynolds was afraid. Not on edge. Not alert.

Afraid.

“You’re right. You do know me.” Jill said. The blade caught the light and his blood gleamed upon it. It looked less like a threat and more like a promise. “And I’m not taking anything from you that you’ll be able to get back.”

***

  
May 21, 1999  
Ecuador

  
The glass door swung shut on its hinges with a quiet clap behind them. As they passed from the beat of the late-day Ecuadorian sun into the damp shadows of the facility, there was no light but the milky spreading spots of the small lamps clipped to their gear. Kevin scanned the room. It was empty — a desk with a rolling computer chair. No papers, no computer equipment that he could see. No people, no bodies, no blood. Nothing but motes of dust floating on the stale, warm, thick air. An oppressive, hot blanket of silence over the soft shuffle of boots and equipment as they spread and cased their surroundings.

Then, a flash: a wire, taut and thin like fishing line, glinted back at Kevin when his light fell across its span between the two frames of the door jamb. 

“Heavy,” Kevin said, grabbed the damp warmth of his shoulder to still him, and pointed. “The door, near the bottom. Look.”

Heavy craned his head, squinted. “Hold here,” he said, his deep voice a just above a whisper. He shuffled up alongside the single doorway leading back further into the facility, put his rifle on the floor, and knelt to look at the frame. “Okay, back up.” He said, gestured with one hand towards them, didn’t turn around. “Back towards the wall.” Heavy tightened the knot on the black bandanna wrapped around the slick wet coils of his hair, having given up on controlling the pieces that snaked from underneath it down the back of his glistening neck. Wiped his hands on the thighs of his pants. Then he leaned over, unfurled a canvas tube upon the floor, thin steel tools bound to its surface with elastic bands. He used one of them to tinker with a small bracket on one side of the door, near ankle-height. 

“Good eye,” Kennedy said to Kevin, one eyebrow cocked. “That was almost bad.”

“Just jumped out at me. Didn’t fit with the rest of the environment.”

“I don’t get it,” Kennedy continued, “there’s one door. Why trip wire your way back out? Were they trying to keep something from getting in, after them? There was nothing out there.”

“Unless this isn’t the only exit,” Kevin said, half-watching Heavy’s wide shoulders work while he labored. “Whoever dug that hole didn’t want any unexpected guests while they rounded up the incriminating evidence, maybe.”

The wire fell, slack, its metal bracket hitting against the tile floor with a clink. An electronic device came off of the wall in one of Heavy’s hands. He turned it, looked it over. It didn’t look like much of anything to Kevin — maybe a distant cousin of a smoke alarm.

“What’d you find?” Kennedy asked. 

“Well, we got ourselves a real Scoobarific mystery.” Heavy said, rolled up his tools, tucked them in a pocket, and stood. “Whoever bugged this place did it long enough ago the batteries on the detonator died.” He collected the trip wire, wound it around one of his fists and also tucked it away for safe keeping. 

“So they’re long gone?” Kevin asked. 

Heavy shook his head and sniffed, wiped his face with a forearm. “Nah, it don’t tell us much. These things suck battery like crazy, you gotta use ‘em quick. Sixteen hours, twenty tops if it wasn’t just a dud. Move slow. Watch your ankles and elbows.”

Heavy fell back ahead of them, pushed the door open with one large, tentative hand. It swung with a high, unsure creak. There was only one more room; a treatment room, filled with empty gurneys and hospital beds outfitted with cranks, flanked by shining chrome IV poles. Ambient emergency lights cast a dim pall over the room. Barely enough to read by. 

They tore the place apart. A small doctor’s office held more of the same. Emptiness, darkness, silence. No files, no computer. Nothing.

“I don’t see any documents,” Kevin said, and pushed the chair against the desk aside again, the way a man might open a fridge door he’d just closed to see if food had spontaneously apparated. “It’s dry, Heavy. There’s nothin’ here.”

Kevin sat back and glassed the room again. Nothing jumped out — no secrets, no panels, no buttons. Well… except one, tiny, minuscule thing, not even worth commenting on. But, because Kevin was Kevin, he commented on everything, even the things that need not be, just to fill the air.

“Stupid motherfuckers left a bag of IV fluid hanging,” he said in a offhanded way, pushed the empty bag — about the size of his fist — and watched it swing. “Someone must’ve been here recently at least. There’s still stuff in it.”

Kennedy perked and looked at him. Stalked over to him and looked at the bag, the bed.

“What?” Kevin said.

“Move,” Kennedy said, “get off the bed.”

“Why, you—”

Kevin and Kennedy saw it at the same time. They looked to each other, then crouched on their haunches to investigate. 

“It’s bolted to the floor,” Kevin said, “Under the wheels.”

“A stretcher that ain’t supposed to move?” Heavy said, and shook his head. “Can you move those beds? Over, on the other side of the room.”

The men checked them. All of the beds, even locked, screamed metallic and shrieked against the floor, but would scoot if pushed hard enough. Kevin and Kennedy tried to push this one, but it didn’t budge.

Kevin looked around. “They’ve all got these pole things…” he said, “but this is the only one with a bag of shit on it. Was someone in here?”

Kennedy rounded the bed, looked at the bag again. He pressed down the red power button with a long thumb, and the machine made a jingle, neon green numbers parading across its screen. “How do these work?” He asked.

“Drip tubing from an IV,” volunteered one of the men, “wife is…” he caught himself, “was… a nurse. Had to do these all the time for her mom that was on dialysis while she stayed with us.”

“Watched her a million times,” the man said, “here. You press…” he showed Kennedy, who tried a few combinations of numbers. _Boo-woop_ , the machine sang, and it sounded to Kevin like the Price Is Right’s losing horn, reminded him of days home sick from school. Heavy came up behind them to watch.

“Four milligrams per 30 minutes…” Kennedy mumbled to himself, reading the order printed on the bag’s label. He tried again. _Boo-woop_. “I’m missing something.”

“Machine says over 60, right? That’s an hour.” Kevin volunteered. “So it’d be 8 milligrams an hour if it’s 4 per 30 minutes. Try putting 8 in, instead.”

Kennedy thought about this, then followed the directions, input the orders on the bag — 8 mg / 60 m. As soon as he hit the “start infusion” button, the floor rumbled. The bed started to move, move towards the other wall, but was stopped, ramming against something on the floor that blocked its path.

“Holy fuck,” Kevin said, and jumped back as the floor shook and trembled, the gurney ramming against something solid underneath it.

“It’s the tiles,” Heavy said, “move ‘em out of the way.”

They crouched and pried the heavy stone tiles up with their knives, lifting them and tossing them onto the empty beds. Once the path was clear, he nodded to Kennedy, took a step back out of the way. “Try it again.”

This time, the deep rocky _cha-chunk_ sounded and the bed ground on its island, slid with ominous slowness towards the other wall. A staircase, black and narrow and steep as a mountainside led down a black corridor that led to a blue square of broad steel tiles somewhere far below. Broad steel tiles dashed through with great black splashes. A red light spun somewhere down below, winking against the blue in steady increments. The sudden smell of blood and rot and sickly-sweet infection puffed from the basement level on a gust of sterile, cold air. 

Kevin gagged, the sound wet and guttural with impending vomit. He stilled his mouth against his fist, turned his head. The men fell back a step, squeezed their eyes closed and coughed, waved their hands in front of their faces to waft the smell away.

“Jesus Christ,” Heavy said. “It’s a NEST. No wonder they wanted these documents so bad.”

“And no wonder there’s nobody here,” one of the other men said, “look at all that fucking blood down there.”

“How the fuck’d you figure that out?” Kevin asked. Kennedy just shrugged.

“Looked for something that didn’t fit with the rest of the environment, just like you did,” he said, and knelt. “You pointed out that it was the only bag. Why would they just leave one, by a bed that doesn’t move?” 

“Look at Yale over here,” one of the men laughed, and Kennedy looked halfway between embarrassed and proud. 

“Alright,” Heavy said, “Kennedy. You know what to do.”

“Already on it,” Kennedy said, “you guys cover me if you can and I’ll grab the information.”

“Be ready to cover your eyes,” Heavy said, and freed a cobalt blue cylinder from his belt. “Somethin’s down there, and we’re at a choke point on the stair case. If I see it, I’ll throw and buy you some time to get in formation. We good?”

“I got you,” Kevin said, “give me a second to find cover and we’ll have some dead BOW for dinner tonight.”

They descended the staircase, cautious and slow. Despite his everpresent bravado, Kevin couldn’t shake the feeling of not belonging — that they weren’t supposed to be here. That they were playing dice with the universe, and that something greater than them had kept them safe so far, but was absent this time. That their guardian angels had taken a vacation. A chill fired down his spine.

Something was wrong.


	24. The House of Gold and Bones

((Hey everyone! I normally don’t do this [because we all know RE is full of gross shit] but there’s a trigger warning on this chapter specifically for trypophobia. If you’re not sure what that is, it’s a phobia of things that have a lot of holes, specifically in conjunction with bugs. I know some people have a real problem with holes, bugs, bugs coming out of holes, and RE hasn’t really done that before so just be aware it is a heavy fixture in this chapter and if it super bothers you, you may wanna skip the action sequences. Also there’s a lot of body horror in this one. ILUguys!))

May 22, 1999  
Ecuador

  
As they descended the staircase, one of the men took a shaking breath through his nose, gagged, and threw up. 

“I’m gettin’ there too,” Carlos said, and swallowed the flood of saliva in his mouth. The door had closed behind them, and without the uncontaminated air to dilute the stench, the stairwell smelled with power overwhelming of blood, blood and something else; the smell of copper and rot, like an entire dump truck full of pennies and rancid meat. It was so cold that the dark hairs on Carlos’ arms were standing up, his skin pricked with goosebumps under his corded black fatigues. “Everyone put your masks on. Got a feeling its gonna get worse the closer we get.”

The team stopped, feet propped on the steps, and pulled the masks over their faces. Angled plastic pieces of equipment strapped tight against the back of their heads covered their jaws to the point at the apex of their nose-bridge in a rounded triangle, sealed off the precious mucous membranes from the outside world. Two large circular ventilators screwed onto each side of their mouth protruded from the mask like oversized bolts. 

“We good?” Carlos asked. The smell abated but didn’t completely disappear, still perceptible. 

_Good_ responded everyone but Kevin, who remarked with distaste about how he felt like a “fuckin’ gimp” with the mask on as he tugged at its seams to make it fit, his voice projected and computerized through its ventilators.

They hit the floor, a ring of bootsoles on metal, and a scene unfolded before them that was so alien and violent that it took moments to piece together exactly what they were looking at. 

There were bodies. Mostly of women, but some men, long dead and gray-skinned, bloated and blind. There were holes in their clothes, their green scrubs and white doctor’s coats, as if somebody had gone to town on their bodies with some sort of grotesquely huge hole punch, left dark divots through which rib and hip and femur bones winked from their shadows. Their flesh was stripped from bone, now gray and dry, in savage, illogical animal patterns; one woman had the entirety of her spinal column and upper chest exposed, but the flesh on her face untouched. Another was missing an entire leg under her suit skirt, but nothing else. 

The floor and walls were covered with slashes of dark, fetid blood, no longer glistening under the blue emergency lights but dried to thin crusts of material that flaked and scattered under the puffs of recycled air. A flash of movement caught the corner of Carlos’ eye; in the junctures between the floor and the ceiling and the walls, piles of what looked like melted honeycombs made of black iron had been plastered, then plastered over again, an incongruent crust that was more hole than structure. They looked dirty and organic and disorganized against the sterling white metal plating of the walls, now struck through with filth. 

Those combs squirmed with movement. Monstrosities unseen chittered and moved and weaseled behind and through the holes, climbed out of them then into them again in the frantic darting movements of insects. Carlos saw a fat, glistening larvae the color of milk, the size of one of his fingers, move behind one of the holes and then into the dark. His stomach lurched.

“You know what these are?” Kennedy whispered, coming up beside him. Carlos shook his head.

“New on me,” he said, and had to move his gaze away before it would make him sick.

Then Carlos saw it. A laced black boot poked out from behind a desk. Carlos rounded the desk with careful, slow steps, one over another. A man in banded black armor lay behind the desk, stretched like a starfish, surrounded by savage hashmarks of blood, as if someone had thrown him into a blender without a lid and let the liquid fly where it may. One of the red eyepieces of his helmet was smashed out, a hole bored through his face clear to the back of his head. The red-and-white Umbrella emblazoned on his shoulder was half-torn from his uniform, the flesh of his arm underneath it missing, stolen from its connected tissues. His rifle was still in his hand.

Kennedy walked behind, taking pictures. The men grouped behind Carlos, looked down at the body. 

“Poor bastard,” said one.

“Umbrella…” said another, “might have known. Whenever something’s fucked up, these stooges aren’t far behind.”

“Heavy,” Kennedy said, “look. There’s documents and a computer on the desk.”

“Alright,” Carlos said, shaking his head. “Gather it all into a stack. We’ll bring it back as we go so we can grab it on the way out and don’t gotta punch too far into this shithole to get what we need if we have to evac. Kevin, you good with being on scavenger duty?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said, “I gotcha.” He sidled up beside the dead Umbrella mercenary. Slung his rifle around to his side, and picked up the man’s gun. The dead man’s hand clutched it, unwilling to relent even in the frozen throes of death — _No, this is **my** rifle, get your own._

The men were shuffling papers and carrying monitors when Kevin cried out, and every head swung to look at him where he crouched. Legs long and thread-thin spindled out from one of the holes in the mercenary’s corpse, just under his ribcage, like a beckoning finger. Kevin started back and fell onto his backside on the floor, then struggled to his feet and moved back to Carlos once more, pistol in hand. The thick muscles of his forearms tensed like shaking cables under the clinging fabric of his uniform. 

“Parasites,” Kennedy said, “but what are they feeding on?”

Carlos was reminded of the mosquito outside, about its tumor, the appendages that struggled to wriggle free of its host. He looked up to the combs again. He opened his mouth to speak and was interrupted by the hydraulic hiss of a door, somewhere down the hall; Carlos gestured to the team, ordered them to fall back behind the wall. They did so, and barely dove behind its cover when the sound of feet pinging against the metal floor sounded somewhere down the way, behind puffs of exhausted breath. 

A man in the same black banded armor trudged down the hall at in a frantic hobble, panting through the filters of his mask, looking back over his shoulder every few steps. His arm was torn open at the bicep, bleeding and dripping onto the floor. He held his arm against a great gash across his stomach. A heavy jug of water, the kind they’d prop upside down on an office dispenser, strapped to his back. He wore a pack on his side, stuffed to bursting with angular and round objects. So distracted was he that he didn’t stop to look at the pile of evidence that magically apparated in his path, instead stepped around it. 

Carlos waited for him to pass and then pounced, grabbed him around his neck with one arm and then yanked him into the sea of men waiting behind the wall. The motion dislodged the jug of water and it dropped to the floor with a massive bang that echoed. The jug rolled and stopped against the dead man’s boot. The man cried out in surprise, but then was silenced by the barrel of Carlos’ pistol as it tapped against the side of his helmet. He held up his hands.

“Just relax man,” the man panted, “just relax, okay? You need food? I got food. I—” 

“Shh,” Carlos said, “how many of there are you?”

“I…” The man’s mask shielded his face, but the way his body language wilted, just for a flash, told more of a story than glances ever could. “I don’t know,” he said, “five? Maybe?”

Carlos shook his head. “Why would Umbrella only send five spec ops for an entire NEST cleanup? You lying?”

“You’re not…” the man looked around to them. “You’re not Umbrella.”

“Bingo,” Kevin said. 

“Fuck. Th-they didn’t send five. They sent _fifteen_. Now between the fucking bugs, the fights over water — there are five. Maybe. Maybe just one. I haven’t seen my squad in…” 

_Clickety-clickety-click._ The man swung his head around, looked over his shoulders. He began to shake.

“It’s coming,” he breathed, “they’re coming. You gotta get out of the hallway.”

“What’s coming?” Kennedy said, turned to look. The team was distracted, distracted just long enough, that the man broke free of Carlos’ grip and took off in a run, boots pounding _ping ping ping_ against the floor as he sprinted down the hall, his energy freshly fueled by panic.

“Hey, _wait_ —” Carlos called, but it was too late. 

It pounced, quick as a flash, as if magnetically attracted to the man’s body. It was an insect, huge but also breakable-thin, legs the width of string, as long as Carlos’ body. It ducked against the man’s neck with savage speed, burrowed through the bands of his armor, shook its head segment back and forth and shredded the black leather and plate as it did so; it hit blood, and the man’s carotid artery burst, began to spray. He screamed and clutched for it, muffled by his helmet. Where there was one, then there was two, then there was three, as if attracted to him through scent or some other invisible force. The things struck him to the floor, drunk from the man’s opened throat, from his wrists, from the soft insides of his groin. Savage chittering noises and squeals between sounds of sucks and clicks. 

Carlos held out a hand for the men to fall back. As the man’s body twitched and shook and pounded against the floor, a translucent sac on the insect’s back end, once yellowish, puffed up and began to fill with the blood, blackish-red and thick. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Kennedy breathed. “They’re like—”

“Fleas,” Kevin said, “or leeches.”

“Bedbugs,” Carlos added.

“I was gonna say vampires, but okay.” Kennedy finished, with a look on his face that wasn’t sure what the fuck the other two had seen in their lives, but he was glad he wasn’t along for the ride. 

They stood in silence, and one of the men looked up to the combs attached to the ceiling. _Look_ , he said, in a whisper. One of the insects disengaged from the mercenary’s body, its sac engorged, and crawled back up to the structure between the wall and the ceiling. They all watched as it regurgitated the man’s blood and worked its spindly forelegs, patted the blood along the structure in its thin spots. Some of it dripped to the floor, down the wall. Those milk-white larvae, wet and shining, squirmed out of the holes and began to feed.

Suddenly Carlos realized what those nests were made of. Why the smell was so strong. Why there were no animals outside, why the only victim they’d found was a mosquito, an animal that fed on…

“Blood,” Carlos said, “this was an HIV clinic back in the day, they said.”

The men turned to him, eyes wide.

“It went straight for him cause he was injured,” Kevin said, “but not for us?”

“We can’t be sure,” Carlos said, scooped up the tankard of water by its handle, and passed it to one of the other men, who hugged onto it like a child. “But we gotta get the fuck out of this hallway.”

“There,” Kevin pointed. Down the hall, buried in its navy shadows, was a display small enough to be missed by any except the keenest sights; the computer panel outside the door said LOCKED in a scrolling marquee with a Ghostbusters-style “no” sign around it, a red circle with a line drawn at an angle. “He was runnin’ that way. That’s gotta be where he was hiding out.”

“It’s a start,” Carlos said, watching the insects. They burrowed and sucked at the man’s body, unsatisfied with the paltry amount of blood they’d drawn. Still hungry. They chittered like crickets. “I’m gonna throw a molotov, then that’s our cue to get the fuck out of here down to that doorway. You think you can open it?”

Kennedy shook his head. “Probably not.”

“I got it,” Kevin said, and unslung his rifle. Its laminated walnut stock gleamed in the light. “I’ll get us in there, just say when.”

“Kennedy — you rolling?”

“Got it all,” he replied. “Let’s do it.”

Kevin knelt, aimed, and as sure as the sun rose and set, shot the panel clean off of the wall with a single crack. The door malfunctioned, started to shake and rattle. 

_Security protocol initiated_ , a robotic female voice said in the distance, _pneumatic door controls disabled. Have a **fantastic** day! _

Carlos yanked the circular key out of the top of the grenade, rolled it underhand along the floor; it clinked and bounced. The insects ignored it, still trying to feed on what remained of the man’s body. The grenade exploded in a plume of flame and smoke, flashing out in a wide blast of heat, and the insects screamed, thrashing.

“Go,” Carlos yelled, “ _go_!”

They ran. Kennedy was fastest, his long legs carrying him with balletic grace in a hurdle jump over the mercenary’s body and the smoldering insects; Kevin followed, cradling his rifle as he ran, huffing and puffing in the signature smoker’s struggle; the rest followed at their pace, sprinted for the open door. Carlos barreled through the smoke and the smell of burning blood; the heat seared at his eyes, singed the fine hairs on his face. A great buzzing like the world itself had begun to vibrate on its axis, a great crowd of the things freed themselves from the holes on the ceiling and the floor. Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Carlos headed up the end of the line, covering them from behind with rattling reports of his assault rifle. The muzzle flashes lit the corridor in bursts. When it was clear there were too many of them to take out, he grunted and turned, trucked down the hallway on heavy footfalls after his men.

“Heavy, come on!” One of the men cried. He knelt, drew a bead, and began to fire into the crowd, but the sound behind didn’t die; where one fell, five took it place, tapping against the metal with insistent, hungry speed.

Kennedy and the rest of the team pulled on the door, their fingers curled around its heft, pulled with all their might. It slid open, heavy and solid, and the men piled into the room. Carlos shoved the last teammate in ahead of him and then slammed the door shut by a large steel loop welded to the inside, huffing and puffing for breath. 

“Heavy?” said Kennedy, his voice quiet, wary.

Carlos turned.

A woman, her hair braided flat against her head away from her scarred umber-brown face, clutched a shotgun with a drum barrel. Her sleek, matte black armor was slashed and scarred and broken open in places by what looked like massive claw marks. Two men flanked her on either side, pistols aimed at the crowd of men from the other side of the room. Her eyes were dark and shining, like glittering chips of some black gemstone, and she crept towards them. Kevin already had his pistol in his hand, aimed at her head. Their sole equalizer.

The bugs outside threw themselves at the door, slamming and squawking in protest.

“Put it down,” Kevin warned, “I ain’t givin’ you another warning.”

“American?” She asked, in a thick French accent.

“You’re damn right,” Kevin said, “and I said, _in American_ , to put it the fuck down before I turn your head into a canoe.”

“Watch it,” said one of the men beside her, also creeping towards him, “looks like there’s three guns over here and only one over there, Desperado.”

“Pff,” Kevin sneered, “I don’t need three guns for you assholes. Pull and see what happens.”

With that, neither group moved; the air quivered and vibrated, and Kevin held his ground. 

“Put your weapons down.” Carlos said, from behind the sights of his assault rifle. "This don't gotta get ugly, but I ain't opposed to it."

“And if we don’t?” She asked. It took a second or two to disentangle her words from one another.

“We got food,” Carlos said, and then pointed to the jug held by one of his men without looking away, “and water. Enough for everyone. You need both, last I heard.”

Her eyes flashed to the jug on the floor, then back to Carlos. “Where did you find that?” She asked, sharp.

“Around,” he said, “don’t worry about it.”

“If we disarm, you’ll give us the water?” She asked.

“If you disarm we won’t turn you into bug food,” Carlos responded, “food and water, you gotta give me something better than that. Like intel.”

“It’s a trap,” one man whispered, “don’t give ‘em shit, Heavy.”

“Weapons,” Carlos repeated, and projected his voice. “Unload ‘em and put ‘em down. _Now._ ” On the last word it boomed, bounced around the room and reverberated back to them off of the metal walls. It made Kennedy jump.

“ _Tu aimes jouer à des jeux, espèce de connard malade_?” One of her men fired back in rapid-fire speed, “ _Une fois que nous serons sortis d'ici, nous verrons qui joue à quels jeux avec qui. Attends, putain._ ”

“Hey, that’s cool,” Kevin called, “but lemme give you the American translation.” Then he began to cluck like a chicken. The men all began to laugh, except for Carlos, whose gaze was still focused on the woman with the braids.

She held a hand to the man beside her, silent, a gesture that cut his posturing short and had him fall back a step. 

“So if we do not talk, you kill us?” She asked. “Is this the deal?” 

“If you don’t talk we ain’t inclined to help you _not_ get killed,” Carlos responded, “looks like you’ve been havin’ some trouble with that so far.”

“If you do not, we die anyway, and you are no closer to what you’re here for.”

“You know what we're here for, huh?" He asked. Her expression faltered, as if she'd just been caught. "Who are we?"

Again, her eyes went to the water, then back to Carlos. On her silent command, they hesitated and then unloaded their guns, rounds plinking to the floor. They jiggled the catches, opened the drums to show no rounds were left, then crouched, placed them on the floor, and stood. Raised their hands in surrender. She was the last, but eventually followed suit, her chin jutted, proud and obstinate. The men on Carlos’ team retrieved the weapons, shoved the loose bullets into their carrying pouches. On his order they patted the mercenaries down, came back with knives and garrote wires and backup weapons of all kinds.

She watched them. 

"Eff bee see," she said, "Americans. Come to collect Umbrella data."

Carlos nodded. "Any reason you're also here and have a mass grave dug outside, just for the occasion?"

She was silent.

"Jesus," Kevin mumbled.

"We only do what we are order to," she said, "like you."

"Where've I heard _that_ before," Kennedy sneered.

"We disarmed," she said, "we can give you more information. But we need water. And food."

Carlos considered this. “We had a deal,” he said, “Kevin, fill a canteen and give them some of the food in the bag.”

Behind Carlos' back, his men exchanged looks, unsure. Kevin did as he was bade; she leaned forward and snatched it like she expected them to round on her as she extended her hand. They tore the packages open and devoured the food cold with their hands, made short work of the tankard of water, and extended it for a refill.

“Not until you talk,” Carlos said, “that’s all for now.”

She glared at him, cold and murderous.

“Your men need information,” she said, “mine need water. You told us the truth… so you can stay. But one of my men will watch. You understand?”

One of the men behind her protested. She barked something at him, sharp and guttural and loud. The man retracted.

“Fine,” Carlos said, “we’ll both post a guard. We’ll stay on this side of the room, you over there. When everyone’s fresh we can come up with an escape plan.”

“Teamwork,” she said, and something in her face made Kevin shudder beside him, as if he'd caught a chill. "Good."


	25. DNA

The man’s eyes flicked to the side. Telegraphed his next movement. He glanced down to the gravel and the dust, where Sullivan’s body lay, limp and twisted like a dead bird, her blonde hair fluttering in the wind. His coat caught the bluster, opened to reveal its bright cobalt silk lining, and then lay still and straight once more. He darted to the side, sudden and desperate. His injured leg weighed at him, the movement a graceless jerk that almost sent him to the ground. 

Jill slid across the ground, matching his movements. He stooped to grope for his partner’s lapels, to jam his hand inside her jacket. Jill kicked him as hard as she could, the flat span between the top of her foot and her shin connecting with the side of his face with a dull, wooden smacking noise. A clear shower of spit flung from his mouth, his head snapped to the side. 

Reynolds dove against her, against her midsection, sent them both toppling to the ground. Jill fell onto her back, his weight against her, her knee cocked up between them, against his stomach. The world spun and then was upside-down; she tossed him. He landed on his side. As quick as she was, she was still on the ground, without her knife, and he was back on his feet; he rushed her, kicked her in the shoulder. Unleashed a flurry of blows, partly from rage and partly from the exultant cruelty of revenge. She didn’t guard her head. She curled into a ball, as if guarding her solar plexus, allowed the blows to rain down on any other part of her body he aimed at. Reynolds was happy to oblige, and in his satisfaction, didn’t question the reasoning. 

She twisted, opened her legs, and last his kick landed against the inside of one of her thighs. Her other leg closed around his feet from the other side, tripped him forward. She wrapped herself around him like a snake, their legs a figure-eight tangle with one of his trapped between her thighs, thick with muscle. She cried out, a cry of exertion, bucked her hips and rolled them both on the ground. A deep, wet tearing sensation wrenched his knee; the tendons burst, twisted apart under the lock, a meaty series of popping noises. His leg twisted inwards, the bones of his lower legs no longer connected up past his knees. He screamed, screamed and clutched his knee, the world an explosion of agony and heat, unable to move.

Jill stood, slow and ominous. Her entire body heaved for breath; she leaned down, and collected the knife from where it spun away from her. Reynolds clutched his leg, pale freckled fingers dug into expensive dark gray material, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth. Put his temple to the ground. Whimpered in pain.

“I am so fucking _sick_ of Umbrella’s shit,” Jill said, and kicked him dead in his kidney. The air swooped out of his body. “You think your fancy black coats” another kick, “and your money” another one, “and your parade of _useless_ hitmen scare me, and none of you have learned yet that _you_ ,” she kicked him again, this time with a hopping wind-up, and he nearly fainted. “Should be scared of ME.”

“I’m sorry,” he pleaded, not sure where to clutch himself. His side and his lower back felt blistering hot, swollen and stiff. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Jill paused for breath. Wiped her mouth. Over the wind, _Auld Lang Syne_ started to play, bright and electronic from his pocket. His eyes opened. He looked at her, as if expecting a reaction.

“Answer it,” she said.

“No,” he replied, through a shaking pant. “He’ll kill me.”

Jill said nothing. She adjusted her grip on the knife in her hand, and walked to him, her body language coiled, full of intent.

“Okay, okay,” he said, and held up a hand to her. “Just don’t. Okay. Hang…” he swallowed, “hang on.”

She stopped.

“Put it on speaker,” she said. “So I can hear.”

He looked at her, mouth parted and eyes wide. Then he squeezed them shut, breaths still heavy. “If I do,” he said, “are you going to let me go?”

“The conversation should be about what I’m going to do if you don’t,” Jill responded, “one thing at a time.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved a small phone. Navy blue, with a green electronic screen. He punched the “answer call” button with his thumb, then pressed the speaker button, placed the phone on the ground. Tried to catch his breath.

“Reynolds,” said a male voice, deep and authoritative. Unhappy, from the sounds of it. “It’s been three hours. Is it done?”

Reynolds looked up at her again. Then, Reynolds said, “Yeah. She’s 86. Wouldn’t take the money. She got Sullivan, though. Plucky little thing.”

“Not plucky enough. I told them not to try to buy her. Guess they know now, though.” As the voice continued, Jill cocked her head, eyes narrowed. Mental calculus. Trying to place the voice to a face — familiar but not, all at the same time. “Stupid goody two-shoes cunt. She was pregnant, you know. Guess one of the guys on the team knocked her up. Did him a favor, I think.” Reynolds’ eyes turned, slowly, towards her. Towards her stomach, then back at her face. Something in Jill’s expression went blank, eyes wide and distant and unblinking. A clap of thunder in the form of realization, and she looked back at the phone. “And she still got Sullivan?”

“On the team…” she repeated, her voice so quiet the May wind snatched it away, the movement of her lips the only signal she’d said anything at all. 

“Yeah,” Reynolds said, “still got her.”

“All’s the more for you,” the voice said, “turn in the evidence and—”

“Captain Harris,” Jill said. Reynolds winced, squeezed his eyes shut. “Isn’t that right?”

Silence. “Who is this?”

“ _Guess_.”

The phone call disconnected with a click and then static, a long beep. Jill turned to Reynolds. 

“I didn’t—” he pleaded, held one hand up as if to encourage her to use caution, mercy, patience. Any virtue he could grope for. It made a twisted sort of sense. Her viciousness in her own defense, the looks of desperation, the way she hadn’t even tried to guard her own head. They weren’t on her behalf — they were on behalf of someone _else._

“I didn’t know you were — they didn’t tell us.” Reynolds breathed. “I promise they didn’t.”

“Would it have made a difference?” She asked, and there was a violence in her voice; not a violence of emotion, but a violence of resolution. Calm and smooth. No anger. Reynolds didn’t respond, puffed a sigh of pain. Then, she moved. Moved to him with an aggression in her demeanor matched only by her coldness. Grabbed him by his wrists and drug him across the ground, leaving a trail of patchy blood scraped against the gravel. Tiny stones and dirt scraped under him, and his injured leg twisted inwards. He screamed. Jill leaned over and tugged at the knot of his tie with nimble fingers, freed it from around his neck in a sharp yank and whizz of fabric against his collar. He tried to fight her, tried to grab her wrists and pull her — maybe he could headbutt her or choke her or do _something_ to knock her out. Maybe he could still get away.

She kicked him. Stomped on his face with the sole of her boot, broke his nose under it. Kicked him again. Then, she tied him by his wrists to the metal support rod of a nearby Caterpillar excavator, tied his wrists so tight his hands wouldn’t move of their own accord even when willed.

“So you’re going to kill me?” He asked, with a laugh. “Jill fucking Valentine, hero of Raccoon City,” the blood from his nose coursed salty and warm into his mouth, and he spit it out all over his shirt, “going to come down from her lofty perch to kill a hit man. How the mighty’ve fallen.”

Jill didn’t say anything in response. That same cold stare; that stare that told him he was beneath her. Not worth responding to. She grabbed one of his leather gloves by the tip of his middle finger, pulled it off. Pulled it on to her own hand, then picked up his phone.

She prised the case open with her knife. Inside, a blinking red light, stuck against the side of the phones case. That made her smile. Just a touch. She dropped the light into his shirt pocket without touching it. Then she hit the “return call” button.

No answer. Voicemail. She held the phone near her face as she waited — their eyes met.

“Captain Harris,” she said, “you can't run from me. I know. And he’s the reason I know.”

She hung up the phone. Began to search for something, and settled on the blue plastic of a tarp; cut a square from it with his knife, and wrapped his phone in it for safe keeping. Collected her sweater, and scrubbed her prints in systematic order, trying to recall everything she’d touched.

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Reynolds heaved. He jerked against the pole, his wrists tied so tight they barely moved. “You’re not safe. You’re never going to _be_ safe. You or your stupid bastard kid. We don’t just stop, Jill. You’re going to fucking die.”

Jill stopped. Looked at him.

“You already tried,” she said, “I’m not impressed.”

And then she was gone. 

***

  
May 23, 1999  
Washington D.C.

Jill sat alone on the couch. Tried to drink her coffee. Swallowing hurt; anything that used her throat hurt. Talking, swallowing, even breathing. She touched her fingers to the bruises, the tips brushing against solidity where normally there was only skin. The pretty bobble-headed lady on the news was talking about some sort of ribbon-cutting ceremony. Something she didn’t care about.

“And in other local news, authorities are investigating the murder of two people — a man and a woman — whose bodies were dumped at the site of the new Hilton in downtown Washington.” 

Jill looked up to the television. 

“Both individuals, in their early twenties, were sales managers of beleaguered biotech company Umbrella Incorporated. The woman was shot in the head and the man tied to a piece of construction equipment and his throat cut. The bodies were found by a construction manager who asked to not be named. Chief of Police Molly Severs has stated the murders are most likely related to an uptick of organized crime in the area, considering the date of the murders and their close proximity to the upcoming Congressional trial.”

Jill took a sip of her coffee, squinted as it went down rough. She didn’t kill anyone. They weren’t hunting for her. She wasn’t a psychopath; she would never cheer for someone’s death, no matter how much of a psychopath _they_ were. But she felt hard-pressed to not feel pleasure at the announcements of their obituaries. 

“You hear that?” She asked nobody in particular. She rested a hand on her stomach, a habit that was becoming more natural, and felt a sort of peace. She smiled. “You're welcome.”

((Here I go double-posting again. I got on a rip and got another short wrap-up chapter done! It feels nice to be able to sit and write after all the junk over the last two weeks, so here's some closure before we move into the last stretch of the story :)

You think Carlos is scary? Absolutely 100% _do not fuck_ with mom Jill. I've been wanting to write a chapter where she gets to beast out and use tiny-lady martial arts on someone. You probably shouldn't try to go toe-to-toe with a member of STARS fyi.

Hope you all are doing well <3 loving all of your comments and kudos! You know how to give a girl the warm fuzzies. <3 ))


	26. Goodnight, Saigon

Carlos was having a dream. Who or what it contained was not important — only that it was a good dream, and while he was in it, he was happy. Safe and secure. Before Carlos awoke, a mumbling cut into that dream, replaced the dream-person’s words in a strange way that didn’t fit.

Carlos blinked awake with the slow creep of a man reluctant to let go of what was in his mind. Reality came back into focus: he was seated on the floor, back against a metal desk, his arms crossed and head hung. He glanced around the strange room, dark and cramped and unfamiliar, hot with human breath. Someone was talking to themselves.

Kevin sat in front of him, his back to the Umbrella soldiers who slept on the other side of the room. Kevin was hunched over something in his lap, a pen in his hand.

Carlos looked up. Kennedy sat on the desk above him staring off into space, legs dangled over the side. Across the room on a cot, the woman with the braids smoked a cigarette, tapping her foot in time with a song he couldn’t hear. Each lookout sat in silence while the chests and backs of the pile soldiers between them raised and lowered in slow, snoring breaths, the careless heavy sleep of bodies fed and rested and hydrated for the first time in what might have been days. 

Kevin noticed Carlos’ movement and shifted, uncomfortable. “I wake you up?”

Carlos stretched his back. “A little.” He said, not unkindly.

“Sorry,” Kevin frowned at the paper, wrote for a few moments longer then read it again, his expression unsatisfied.

“What’re you workin’ on?” Carlos asked, leaning the back of his head against the desk. 

Kevin didn’t respond. Not right away. He folded the paper three times. When it was as small as a bank card, he extended his hand to give it to Carlos, but then pulled it back. Finally, he passed the folded paper over, cringed like releasing it was painful. 

“It’s a letter.” Kevin said after a moment, a seriousness in his tone that made Carlos pay attention. “For Alyssa. Y’know, in case…”

This made Carlos smile, a lopsided thing that pulled up one corner of his mouth. He knew Kevin was sweet on her, but this sort of concrete evidence of how sweet surprised him and didn’t all at the same time. These sorts of farewell letters weren’t for girls you just sorta kinda liked: they were _I can’t die without pouring out my heart_ material. Not first-date shit. Carlos leaned forward and took it from him. “I can give it to her, man. No problem.” 

Kevin was definitely not an ugly dude. He had a head of thick, shiny reddish-brown hair that he kept on the long side, only just starting to succumb to the faintest silver peppers around his temples. Surprisingly muscular and trim for a guy who didn’t work out outside of PT at base, a fucking miracle for someone who smoked and drank and ate nothing but crap like Kevin did. Carlos didn’t estimate that Kevin would have to pine over a girl for desperation’s sake — he was a good looking dude, charming and funny. The life of the party. He had options. But it was starting to look like Kevin didn’t _want_ those options, despite all his jocular posturing. It was more serious than he had let on, at least from his side.

Kevin looked to him like he expected jeering, expected teasing. Carlos tucked the letter into one of the deep pockets inside on the side of his fatigue pants, made sure the pocket was closed and zippered tight.

“She’s gonna be leaving soon,” Kevin said. His gray eyes flickered away, down to the floor. He tried to mask the expression by removing his ballcap and smoothing his hair down, pulling the hat back down over his forehead. “So you may have to take it to California.”

“Cali, huh. Not goin’ with her?”

“It’s not like that. I thought maybe, but…” he trailed off. “Don’t matter now, though.”

Carlos felt a slight pang of sympathetic sadness. “Sorry, man.”

“You written one? I can take it to Jill, if you…”

“C’mon, don’t think like that.”

Kevin laughed, incredulous. “Nobody thinks they’re gonna…” he trailed off again, “Our kind don’t… we don’t get to say goodbye. You know? They hear it from other people. But it should come from you.” He was so simple in terms of curiosity, but also prone to spit out little pearls of wisdom, bounce them off your dome when you least expected them. It gave Carlos pause.

In the Marines and more so Umbrella’s employ, the concept of one’s own death became more of an eventuality. You courted it, proposed to it, but were not yet married to death — nevertheless the wedding bells rung for you all the same. They gave you advice on how to prepare: hefty life insurance plans. Updated wills. Appointing executors of your estate if you had anyone you trusted with that sort of control and had any estate to execute. With all his experience in that regard, Carlos had never written a farewell letter to anyone but his mom. He’d never been serious enough with any of the women he’d been with to warrant one. 

Jill would be okay, of that Carlos was sure. She’d have zero problem finding someone else — in his easy way, that failed to bother him. Made him happy that _she’d_ be happy no matter what. But the idea now wasn’t just blackness forever and not having to pay bills anymore and his mother being sad; it was leaving out the door one day and just staying gone, and with him going a number of things he’d held close to his vest. About how she’d also go to her own rest sometime in the future without knowing them because of his belief there would be another day to say so. 

Had the guy with the empty neck and the water jug told his girl he loved her before he left, or did he just assume she knew?

Kevin nudged Carlos, brought him back down to Earth.

“Maybe,” Carlos said, “could you get it to ‘em?”

“You mean Jill? ‘Course,” Kevin said, earnest. “I’m your guy.”

“Alright. Here, pass me some of that paper.”

Kevin did. Carlos stared at it for a good minute, drummed the pen against his leg, then picked it up and moved to somewhere more secluded, more private, and began to write. Kennedy watched him. 

Carlos returned to Kevin a short time later with two folded pieces of paper. When Kevin didn’t reach for them, Carlos offered them again. “Here,” he said.

“I thought you said them. Who’s the other one for?” Kevin raised an eyebrow. “…I ain’t judgin’ you, but I’m only making one trip to _one_ girl. You got me?”

Behind them, Kennedy looked down and away, an unconvincing attempt to appear like he hadn’t been eavesdropping.

“What? No—” Carlos said. “Just give ‘em both to Jill. She’ll get the other one where it needs to be.”

“Okay…” Kevin said, suspicious, and accepted them.

“You should get some more rest, guys,” Kennedy interjected from his perch on the desk, before Kevin could speak again. “You’re up next, Kevin.”

Kevin waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Yeah, yeah…” he said, and laid back down. Carlos crossed his arms again and settled back against the desk. He didn’t fall back asleep right away, but eventually also succumbed.

Kennedy felt the intrusive crawl of eyes upon him and looked up; the mercenary officer was watching them, and something in her face had changed. Where before her glances were hard and dark and carnivorous, now they were open. Considering. They stared at each other for a long beat, two soldiers from opposing armies, the DMZ of sleeping bodies between them like a minefield. She lit up another cigarette and turned away.

***

  
Carlos nudged her side with the heavy, worn sole of his boot. The mercenary officer awoke with a violent start and a gasp. She tried to crawl back away from him, flattened herself against the wall. From her vantage point on the floor he was huge and imposing, all dark shadows under heavy Easter Island statue features. Her face was tense and her eyes darted around to locate her backup. Carlos quirked one eyebrow at her.

“Morning,” Carlos took a step back, his index finger extended across the trigger guard of his rifle. He gestured with his other arm to her men; one was already huddled away with his arm crossed, the other struggling to shake the cobwebs from his head. “Your man fell asleep. Time to get up.”

She climbed to her feet. Tentative, watchful.

“Alright,” Behind Carlos, the FBC team stood in a readied arc with still, disapproving faces, their weapons held with their business ends towards the floor. They cut an intimidating figure: all dressed in black fatigue shirts that stretched up in turtlenecks just under their jaws, down to their wrists, cuffs overlapped by thin black leather gloves. Dark gray fatigue pants and kneepads, heavy boots that laced up to mid-shin. Between them they must have had twenty firearms and enough grenades to level an entire football stadium.

One of them had a lit cigarette that dangled from between his lips. Another flexed his fingers, as if readying them for use. The man before her was the largest of the lot, though she wasn’t sure if he was the most dangerous. Wasn’t sure if she could identify who was, something as normal to her as breathing, a fact that made her nervous.

“You been fed, watered, rested.” Carlos said. “You’ve been gettin’ kind of lazy, so we’re gonna go for a little walk.”

The two men to her side shot glances to each other. She continued to look forward.

“You’ll give us back our weapons, then,” she said.

Carlos laughed. “Nah. We’ve got enough firepower for everyone, don’t worry. But you’re gonna lead us to where the files are. You get us what we came for, well,” he said, “we’ll think about lettin’ you go. Seems fair to me, considerin’.”

“You’re sentencing us to death, asshole,” one of the men said, in a simmer, “you saw what they do to people with open wounds. No deal.”

“You will do well to remember,” she said, finally having had enough, “that _I_ am the Liutenant. Not you. I make the deals. Now still your mouth before you get us all killed, and not just yourself.”

“Trouble in paradise?” Kevin asked, bright and chipper.

“Shut your hole,” the man fired back.

“Way I see it,” Carlos cut in, “in 9 of 10 of the scenarios you got in this place, you’re bug food. And that’s the quick way. Without us you got no water, no food, no ammo, no weapons. I’m giving you a chance to get out of here, but nobody rides for free. You gotta pay your way out.”

“Deal,” she said. “If you do not agree,” she said, turning to her men preemptively, “you are free to try to leave by yourselves. The Company does not pay me enough to die for them when they’ve left us here to wither and rot. Do you understand?”

They were quiet. 

“Good,” she said, and she strode past Carlos’ men, broke their line and bumped shoulders hard with Kevin on her way out. “Come. We’ve already been here long enough.”

“Least one of you’s got some god damned sense,” said one of Carlos’ men as the mercenaries passed through the ranks to follow her. 

They marched the Umbrella mercenaries down the hall. They took tentative, quivering steps, their eyes always on the ceiling. One of them stopped, and Kevin prodded him with the end of his rifle.

“Move,” he said, “don’t get cute.”

They wound around corners and through corridors, down straight paths and through stairwells. But they never got lost. They knew exactly what they were looking for. They came to a large set of double shutters, corrugated silver metal, struck through with yellow and black warning paint.

**WARNING**  
**RESTRICTED AREA, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY**  
**TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT**

  
“There’s those warm Umbrella fuzzies I remember,” Carlos mumbled. “You got the codes?”

The woman just looked at him. 

“Thought so. Unlock the door. You guys’re almost home free.”

“How do I know you don’t kill us as soon as we’re inside?” She asked.

“Guess you don’t,” Carlos said, “you’ll just have to take me at my word. Unlock it.”

She turned, hesitant. Then she dialed in a seven-digit code on the keypad. The sound of grinding metal and a great _chu-chunk_. The two doors slid open to either side of the jamb. Beyond was a room, large, but more than half of its space occupied by a massive bank of computers. Black carbon-fiber boxes with number locks were stacked from floor to ceiling. Enormous computer panels that played camera feeds and neon rat-maze maps of places far below. They all walked inside. 

“Jesus,” Kennedy said, looking around. “Look at all of this.”

It took one second, one single second of his attention being stolen by the wall of monitors and dials and computer equipment for Kennedy’s inattentiveness to alter the course of the team’s history. In a single, lightning-quick lash of a hand, one of the mercenaries freed his auxiliary pistol from the tactical holster on his thigh. The other grabbed the officer from behind in a coordinated movement, yanked her back with a choking noise, her eyes wide. The first didn’t aim the gun at the FBC team — he placed the barrel of Kennedy’s pistol against the side of her head. The barrel hit her skin at the exact same moment as Kevin’s pistol was out of his own holster and in his hand, aimed at the gunman’s forehead.

“Drop it.” Kevin said.

“He laughed. “You think you can get me before I get her, cowboy?”

“Fuck around and find out, you goose-stepping piece of shit.” Kevin said. 

“Let her go,” Kennedy said, “she’s your commanding officer. Think about what you’re doing.”

“What do you care?” The man said, “This has nothing to do with you. She stopped being my commanding officer the minute she decided to sacrifice _us_ so _you_ could get out of here alive. Now don’t try anything funny, or you’ll be picking bits of her skull out of your teeth.”

Carlos wiped his upper lip with the knuckles of his glove. “You understand this mean’s the deal’s off,” he said, “can’t let you threaten someone under my custody and leave.”

“You’re goddamn right it's off,” the man holding her said, “we didn’t agree to it in the first place. That was this stupid bitch.” He indicated her with a shake.

“Kevin,” Carlos said to him, low, “if they so much as blink wrong in her direction, merc ‘em.”

“My pleasure,” Kevin said.

Though she was held at gunpoint, long hands held aloft, the officer didn’t look panicked. She blinked and jostled with a stern, composed expression. They wove in a wide circle around the proximity of the team, out of arm’s reach. 

“Give me your assault rifle,” the man told Carlos, “now.”

Carlos complied, knelt and slid it across the floor. The mercenary stopped it with his boot, then picked it up. Gave the pistol to his compatriot that held her.

“Such a hero,” the man with Carlos’ gun mocked, “that’s why you’re in here, and I’m leaving. You think your wounds are scabbed up enough for a return trip, Solenne? Guess we’ll find out.”

The mercenary officer — the woman they’d referred to as Solenne — walked with them, dragged backwards out of the room. Her face was solemn, evaluative, and she looked Carlos dead in his eyes. 

Then she grabbed for the gun, but not to take it — to control it, the palm of her hand flat over the opening of the barrel. Pushed it up, away from her head. The man fired; her hand exploded outward in a shower of blood and meat and splinters of bone, and though she screamed in pain, she turned, sharp and fast, smeared the viscera down his face in a broad stripe. She placed her foot flat against his stomach and pushed him into the hallway and herself back onto the floor. The other man shot at her, barely missed. The rounds pinged off of the metal walls of the room behind.

The sounds of struggle and the smell of fresh blood brought them from their holes, clicking and squeaking with curious hunger. Kevin had a shot -- a clear one -- but forewent it to grab Solenne and drag her inside the room before one of the insects could bound onto her. Once her body was free of the meridian, the door shuttered closed with a mechanical thump. The monster outside banged against it, outraged. Screams sounded up and down the hallway, terrible screams of agony and horror. And then, there was silence.

Solenne panted and held her wrist, her blood departing her injured hand — which now looked more like an amputated wrist with dangling Halloween finger decorations loosely tied to it — onto the floor in tiny fountain-jet spurts. She let out a long, artful string of curses in French, clutching her arm.

“Probably gonna lose that hand,” said their medic. He tied a tourniquet around Solenne’s wrist, cinched it tight. “But you get points for pure ballsiness, I’ll give you that.”

At that, she chuckled, weak. “My piano playing days are over, yes?”

“Maybe half of ‘em. She’s good, Heavy.”

Kevin gave her a cigarette and she drug on it thankfully, sat on the floor, groaning through gritted teeth. Kennedy looked at her hand.

“Might have to come off,” Carlos said, “that’s gonna bleed even if we try to burn it shut.”

She nodded. 

“You sure?” Kevin asked.

“Luckily I have an extra,” she said, and looked to each of the men, considering, then settled on Carlos. “You. You hold me down. I would hurt your other men.”

“Pff,” Kennedy breathed, and he sounded offended.

She laid flat on the floor, one arm extended out to the side. Carlos knelt over her, sat on her hip bones and pressed his hands down onto her shoulders, leaned his weight on them. He tried not to meet her eyes, but in the way that someone’s mind does exactly the thing they tell it not to, he did. She was looking dead at him with an expression that almost looked like amusement.

“Sorry,” Carlos said, tried for a laugh. “Try not to get too excited, huh?”

“Don’t worry,” Solenne replied in her dry way, “you are not my type.”

It was a messy affair, done in under a minute, but a long minute it was. Kevin had the unfortunate job after losing a game of rock/paper/scissors with one of the other men, who refused to let it go to three out of five no matter how he begged. One of them held the trails of fat and bone and muscle of her right hand flat against the floor. She screamed, bucked against the pain. Carlos rocked a bit, then leaned down harder, felt the bones of her shoulders creak under his palms. 

Carlos made a noise of discomfort. “Just fuckin’ _do it, please_.” 

It took two solid hacks with Kevin’s machete to take the rest of her hand off, down to an angled stump of palm. Her body tried to kick Carlos off, wound and fought under him. Kennedy was ready with a can of spray, rattled it, then coated what remained. The smell of alcohol and greenery filled the air, wilted and died. She screamed again, foreign words through ragged breaths and grits of her teeth. Her open flesh sizzled and bubbled, settled down to a solid plank of pinkish-brown scar tissue. Burnt shut. Kennedy nudged Carlos out of the way, then emptied the rest of the can into the slash marks that danced across her armor. Waste not, want not.

Solenne panted, her eyes squeezed shut. It was a long time before she spoke again. “You,” she ordered, pointing to Kevin, “another smoke, please _._ ”

Kevin laughed, extended a hand and helped her stand. “You got it.” 

While they spoke and lit cigarettes, Kevin’s hands braced on her shoulders. She nodded affirmatives to his questions. Carlos and Kennedy looked around the room. Carlos rubbed his face.

“I’ll get to work scanning it all and sending it to control." Kennedy said. "Could be a few hours. There’s a lot here.”

“Pretty sure we got what we came for,” Carlos nodded, “now just to get back out. Fuck of a day, man.”

Kennedy patted Carlos’ shoulder, a gesture of caring that came as a surprise. Kennedy was a good dude, a good soldier, smart and sharp and hellishly athletic, but socially, wasn’t the easiest to read most of the time. Awkward and stilted and forceful in the way that made people seem sort of stuck-up. 

Carlos looked over to him.

“Go sit down and take a rest. I’ll handle this.” Kennedy said, and then added something that struck Carlos as strange, though he discarded it as nothing as soon as it came: “You’ve got a lot on your mind.”

***

  
They spent the next four hours checking each other over for injuries, down to paper cuts or hangnails. Anything that bled got sealed with spray or electrical tape over a layer of gauze. When that was exhausted, some of them sat down to eat and then rest; some of them played cards from a pack the medic had brought along. Solenne watched Kennedy as he worked, interested as he connected his small palm-set contraption to each computer bank in an organized route, drained its information, then waited for it to upload. The hours crawled. Two became four became six became eight. Then, Kennedy stood, ground his knuckles into his eyes, and said:

“We’re good. It’s all gone, and I managed to jam the door open upstairs. Our path’s clear.” 

“Good job, nerd,” Kevin grunted and climbed to his feet. His knees clicked. “Let’s quit this place.”

Carlos stretched his lower back, hands above his hips; it was starting to give him more problems these days, tiring and cramping easier. His vertebrae popped, and he sighed. “Alright. We all—”

A shriek sounded, cut him off. The wail of a siren, a great calamitous _WEE OOH WEE OOH_ of a noise that split his hearing, ground into his brain. The blue lights around them flickered red, like blood.

_“Remote destruct sequence engaged. Beginning countdown. Please evacuate in an orderly fashion as outlined in your employee manual. Remote destruct sequence engaged. Beginning countdown…”_

“What kinda sci-fi bullshit…” he mumbled, looking around at the ceiling.

“What the fuck?!” One of the men yelled, at Kennedy. The floor trembled like it had caught a chill. “What the fuck did you do?!”

“I… I didn’t do anything,” Kennedy yelled back, over the noise. “There was no remote destruct program on any of the computers, and…”

“Come!” Solenne said, “We’ve not much time.”

“She’s right. We’ll figure out what happened later,” Carlos called, “right now we gotta get the fuck out of here.”

The door slid open on its rails, a phhhssstt of air. The hallway was bathed blood red, emergency flood lights having switched on for the occasion. 

“Alright, everyone out!” Carlos yelled, “I’ll cover your back. Go!”

They didn’t need to be reminded. Solenne sprinted through the hall and was gone as soon as the words left his mouth, and they followed her, their shadows dancing skeletal against the wall. Her sure steps were followed by the medic, the supply ordinance, and their backup firepower. Kevin followed after, jumping the steps three at a time. As Kevin passed through the hallway, movement from the walls began to squirm and undulate; legs by pairs seemingly infinite started to appear, ghoulishly and impossibly long, feeling for grip on the steel. The two mercenaries lay in a tangle, one on top of the other, the corpse that Carlos could see desiccated and sunken under the ruby lights. They had tried to run. Were almost free.

“Fuck,” Carlos cursed, and shoved Kennedy by his back, up the stairs, “get fucking moving, here they come—”

A rattle of assault rifle fire clattered through the air. Something burst in Kennedy’s side, exploded in a spray of blood that cast black against the floodlights. Dark wiggling chunks of something important against slapped against the stairs. He clutched his flank, eyes wide, his young face shocked at its own mortality — and then he fell onto that face against the point of a stair in front of him. Three rounds from the burst hit Carlos’ right shin, tore through the large round muscles of his calf from behind. He felt the bone give out into pieces, sent him to the stairs under his own weight. He dragged himself on top of Kennedy, brandished his pistol, and fired back — the second mercenary had hid under the corpse of the first, and though the floor was doused with his blood, he was still alive, despite how they tried to burrow to him. 

Kevin stopped at the apex of the stairs, shocked into stillness by the unexpected sound of gunfire. He doubled back. “Heavy?!”

“NOW NOBODY GETS OUT!” The mercenary yelled. “MOTHERFUCKERS!” 

A cloud of them were upon him, and his screams sounded like laughter. 

“Kennedy,” Carlos said, slapped him in the jaw. “Kennedy, answer me.”

Kennedy said nothing, his eyes closed, lips slightly parted. His head rocked back and forth. Behind Carlos, the chitinous clink of a leg against metal. Then two. Then hundreds. The trembles of the floor became shakes. They flooded the hallway, jockeying for position to feast upon the man at their dumb supper even as the hallway shook and broke apart at the seams. The stairway canted, turned down by a degree, its floor now cracking along the connection to the support beams. 

Their attention turned to the splash of viscera on the stairs, the open wounds on Carlos’ leg.

“Get him out!” Carlos called to Kevin, tried to crawl to a stand against the wall. They flooded and piled and tried to jump across the gap. Others skittered on the walls, found an alternate route. “Evac! Now!”

“What about y—” Kevin protested.

Carlos knew what had to happen — Kennedy was a good fifty, sixty pounds lighter than him. Kennedy also had the evidence. It was clear who had a better shot at the evac and who didn’t. 

“Don’t make me pull rank, motherfucker,” Carlos yelled, “I’m right behind you! Get him and go!”

Kevin made to argue, horror plain on his face — perhaps at the scene before him, reality being tilted on its axis. Perhaps at the choice he was being forced to make. Kevin screamed a curse of frustration, grabbed Kennedy up, hoisted him onto his shoulders. Kevin trudged away up the steps with Kennedy’s long limbs dangled over his shoulders like ribbons that twisted in the wind, the unconscious man’s mop of stringy blond hair obscuring his face. His blood, free and running and vital, soaked the back of Kevin’s shirt, and they disappeared around the corner.

Carlos followed them on his single leg, dragging himself up the stairs on his elbows and knees. A host of the bugs followed, tried to squeeze into the empty space of the hallway. Even at a run Carlos most likely wouldn’t have gotten out of here on time; crawling as he was, as much as he tried, dragging the dead weight of his leg was another struggle entirely. 

“Where’s Heavy?!” He heard one man cry in the distance, nearly drowned out by the sirens, but couldn’t place their voice over the rumbling and then ringing in his ears.

“He’ll be fine!” Said another. “ _Just go_!”

Carlos dropped his pistol and threw a grenade. It flew sloppy and hit the stair, bounced at a side angle and exploded, plastered the wall with a paste of bug legs and yellow entrails and squirming larvae. He turned and hobbled up the steps, barely caught himself on the wall as the staircase twisted and buckled, the world falling in disorienting angles around him.

Carlos cursed in surprise, and the last step fell from beneath his knees; he hit the plateau of the treatment room on his elbows, yawning nothingness beneath his feet. He pulled himself up, grabbed for anything stable as the building shook like an earthquake, lights and stretchers and desks squealing across the floor and rocking on their mountings. The single gurney beside the IV pole stood like a silent soldier standing guard, determined to keep its post. He tried to pull himself up against it, but the blood loss and movement made his body weak. He shook and faltered and hit his chin on the railing on the way down, forced back to a kneel. Proposing to death again — no. This time, he was pulling up her veil, ready for a great big smack straight on the lips.

 _They hear it from other people,_ said Kevin’s voice in his mind, strangely calm, _but it should come from you._

Carlos shook his head. “Fuck.” And then inside his brain, or maybe his heart, he apologized.

A flash, black and slippery and fast like a shadow met him in the middle of that room. The eyes that met his made him start, and it was only after a second of forcing his brain to still that he realized it was a person.

“Come!” Solenne yelled, and ratcheted her arms under his armpits, pulled him to his feet and propped herself under him like a crutch, dragged him with her. She was tall and wiry and surprisingly strong, and his body leaned against her hard. “No goodbye letters today!”

“You—” Carlos breathed, hobbling on his one good leg. Drug his other. His head leaned against the rough, yarnlike consistency of her braids. “You were supposed to…”

“You are not my commanding officer,” she replied, sharply, “your orders mean nothing to me. Come! Fast, fast!”

Carlos pushed with his foot and they ran. The malicious clock-tick of feet filled the world and then there was stillness, like the eye of a hurricane. 

When the blast sounded, the world was white and ringing and ethereal, and then impossibly hard and painful. Everything smelled like dirt, tasted like blood. Wounds ripped open on Carlos’ arms and he was sent rolling side over side over side, stopped with a savage blow against the stiff, rough roots of a tree. After moments that stretched into hours, Carlos propped himself on his elbows, his head lolling, weak on his neck. He kicked at the dirt with his toes to see if he still had both his legs — from the way one of them screamed, it appeared he still had both. Technically. 

Where there once stood a clinic, now there was a sinkhole filled with rocks of all sizes, dirt and silt and mud that smoked and smoldered like a massive campfire, dying and puffing against the night air and the stars. The ground had tilted by one or two degrees, no longer flat.

“He…” Carlos squeaked. His voice broke. He swallowed. “HEAD COUNT.” He called.

“Here,” Kevin said. He then waved Kennedy’s unconscious hand and said, “Present.”

“Yup.” “Here…” “I’m not here, don’t count me.”

“ _Fils de pute_ ,” Solenne panted, and though Carlos didn’t know French, he knew a curse when he heard one. 

***

  
May 28, 1999  
Quito, Ecuador

  
South American hospitals were… different. The nurses all wore skirts, matronly numbers that hit them at mid-shin, the colorful scrubs of American medicine eschewed for a more formal sort of attire. The food was good, but too spicy for most of the team to get down on with any sort of regularity or enjoyment — they ended up hitting a McDonalds for every meal, and left Carlos to his hospital food. 

The staff tried to speak to Carlos in Spanish, first — understandable. Carlos was relieved when they replied to him in Portuguese instead, a language a few of them seem to be trained in. They ended up staying for six days, waiting for Kennedy to stabilize; they’d had to surgically take out a portion of his large intestine, and the bullet had stolen a hefty chunk of his liver. At first, with precious little medical knowledge outside battlefield triage and hangover cures, Carlos was convinced this was a death sentence. The doctors informed him this was the best case scenario; your liver apparently grew back, which seemed odd and freaky to him, but was confirmed by their medic. The other things the man came close to hitting, like his spine, did not. By the fourth day Kennedy was up and around, but in clear and constant pain, one arm always slung over his midsection unless he stayed doped up on the pills they’d given him.

Carlos hobbled on pair of crutches and tried to balance on the foot bump of his bulky white cast to the end of the pier, where Solenne waited for her boat, chatting happily with the rest of the crew. She wore a pair of jeans, flip flops, a button down shirt over a tank top. Looked normal, compared to them. 

The wooden slats of the dock creaked under Carlos’ weight as he made his way down to meet them.

“Nice of you to join us, Tripod,” said one of the men.

“Big talk for a man who don’t have two metal weapons in hand at any one time.”

Solenne laughed. One of her teeth was capped in the same bright gold as the ring on the wedding finger of her left hand. “You, with no foot, me, with no hand. We almost make a, uh, whole person?”

“That’s right,” Carlos chuckled. “You sure you’ll be good?”

She shook her head. “Don’t be worried about me, Staff Sergeant. I’m not.”

Carlos nodded, extended his hand to shake. Realized he had the wrong one, then re-arranged his crutches and extended the other. They all laughed at him. Solenne shook it.

"Thanks," Carlos said, "for everything."

"Pff," she scoffed, "it is me who should be thanking you. Now we are simply even."

She extended a hand to Kevin and he tilted his head as if to say _aw, come on_ and extended his hands for a hug. She gestured her stump as if to bring him closer. They shook her good hand and offered hugs in turn. The dinging of a bell sounded and a small craft cut the waters, pulled up to port, bobbed upon the water with cheerful enthusiasm, waves lapping at its rusty brown paint.

She picked up her bag, hefted it onto a shoulder, and climbed aboard over a plank that operated as a ramp. Solenne blew them a kiss and waved as the boat pulled away.

" _Bonne chance_ , boys!" She called, then disappeared around the corner of its small cabin. Kennedy sighed.

“What a week,” he said.

The men mumbled in tired agreement.

“Who wants to get a beer?” Kevin asked.

Kennedy glared at him. “My liver, asshole.”

“Oh,” Kevin said. “Well, Kennedy’s out. Who else wants to get a beer?”

Carlos shook his head. They needed precious little prompting to return to their bickering and japes. He left them to it, followed on his crutches, his bad leg held behind him. Quito was a beautiful city, but he felt a gnawing. A call for return. It was alien to Carlos — not so long ago he could have lost himself in a place like this, spent weeks if he would have been allowed to, sucking the marrow of all the culture had to offer with wonder and excitement. Now it felt off, just slightly, like he wasn’t where he should be.

Kennedy fell behind the team as they talked and joked and yelled at each other. He walked beside Carlos, kept his pace.

“You feelin’ okay?” Carlos asked. Kennedy nodded, then looked ahead, a strange sort of expression in his eyes that Carlos couldn’t place.

“Something’s bothering me.” Kennedy said. He took a deep breath in, like he was about to say something hard and important. “You shouldn’t have done that. You’re—” he stopped himself at the look on Carlos’ face, then doubled back and said instead, “you’ve got someone to go back to. I don’t. You should have taken the stuff and gotten out.”

“Well, I didn’t,” Carlos said, “we all know the risks. Guess you’ll just have to find it in your heart to forgive me.”

Kennedy stared at him. Carlos considered that the end of it, when the younger man spoke again.

“There’s something else. Captain Harris hasn’t tried to make contact with us since we left. No check ins, no requests for report. Nothing. Then there was the clean-up team, and the… the _hole_. It’s too coincidental.”

Carlos agreed with him, had the exact same line of thought, but didn’t want a mutiny on his hands — moreover, if HQ knew that they knew, he wanted to be back on American soil and not have their supply lines and route home cut off. “We’ll get it cleared up when we get back,” Carlos lied, “sure it’s the signal being weak, or somethin’. You know?”

Kennedy looked unconvinced, but no further fight came.

“Maybe,” Kennedy said. “That’s probably it.”


	27. Castle

Jill kept to herself for the first few days, watched television and listened to the radio. Pored over her notes, read books, pored over her notes some more. The seclusion didn't bother her; left to her own devices, she preferred to be at home. But these devices were not hers.

For want of something to do, to help the passage of time, Jill decided to clean the apartment.

The apartment didn't need the attention. Not really. Carlos was tidy in the way that bachelors often were, fastidious about trash and food and things that could smell up the place, but she’d never seen him wipe down a counter or mop a floor unless something got spilled. So, she cleaned, as much as her newfound levels of energy would allow her. 

By the third day the place was in pretty good shape. Orderly and picked up, no dishes in the sink, no laundry unwashed. By the fourth, everything was polished and scrubbed, and previously dull surfaces reflected the late May sunlight with proud ostentation. There was one chore left, and it was Carlos’ to handle — a ratty cardboard box of unpacked items, shoved into the corner of his bedroom. He always mumbled about getting around to unpacking it, but never made the time. It was an eyesore against the cheerful show room glimmers and pathological tidiness. 

Jill considered it, but it wasn’t hers to unpack. She left the box, the tiny thorn in the side of her brain, and tried to forget about it.

As the days crawled and bled into one another, Jill went back over the surfaces multiple times. Always found a spot to fixate on, a smudge she had missed. Something to keep her mind occupied. She realized sometime on the sixth day (or was it the fifth?) with a thunderbolt of panic that she’d cleaned Carlos' scent of out the house — now all she could smell was lemon and fresh air. It was like he hadn’t existed at all.

It was a silly thing, something that if he’d caught her doing it red-handed she’d deny and deny and deny it until the day she died. But he was not here to witness. With a sensible resolve Jill went to the bathroom, took the cardinal red bottle of his body wash out of the metal wire caddy that hung from the shower head, and used the soap inside to clean what surfaces remained. The soap was thicker and harder to rinse off than cleaning solution, but Jill didn't care. The comfort was immediate, like being able to breathe again.

A thump of footsteps up the wooden staircase outside seized Jill's breath in her chest. After a long moment, they departed for another door, down the adjoined balconies and away. The tension in her lungs melted into disappointment. 

The sound outside died, and there was silence again. Just a little too heavy, a little too still, to be comfortable. No movement, or jokes, or conversation, and without them Jill was aware of her solitude in a way that was both sudden and acute. Jill turned the plastic dial on the side of her boom box, one of the nice models with the CD player built into the top, increased the volume. A disc jockey with a strange, projected voice spoke fast and clipped at her like an auctioneer, described some sort of contest or another that she ignored.

Jill moved to the dining room table and shifted the chess set from where it sat, prim and stiff-lipped and collecting dust, to wipe under its unfolded board. The black Queen tumbled and knocked over a line of pieces. The rook rolled in a crescent on the wood of the table and toppled onto the floor, plinked off of a chair on the way down. 

“Shit,” Jill cursed, and kneeled to retrieve it. 

Over the crackle of the radio’s grated honeycomb speakers, _Stop_ by the Spice Girls began to play.

~

_Jill’s box of belongings was rote and predictable. Clothes. Makeup and toiletries in pastel packaging. Manila file folders that sandwiched reams of white paper. Stray wires — chargers for electronics she might need._

_Jill dug into the box on the counter, looked for something that seemed important at the time. She tipped onto her toes, sunk down until the cardboard nipped at the skin of her underarms. Beside her, Carlos whistled to himself, high and warbling, like a bird. He noticed a brown wooden checkerboard Jill had displaced on the counter-top and forgotten. The board was small, about the size of a VHS tape, folded in half with hinges on one side. Carlos picked it up and shook it._

_“Checkers?” He asked at the rattling inside._

_“Chess.” She said. Jill stopped, satisfied for now, and lowered back down. “Do you play?”_

_“Nah,” Carlos said, passed it back. “More of a Connect Four guy.”_

_“I can teach you how,” she said, excited, “here, let me set it up.”_

_Jill didn't wait for a response — she unfolded the board, emptied the pieces, flipped it and began to arrange them on the squares. It looked good in the middle of his kitchen table. Sort of sophisticated. “Wait. Connect Four, like the kid’s game?”_

_“Yeah, you heard me. I will_ _**rock** you at some Connect Four_.”

_“It’s literally just counting to four over and over again.”_

_Carlos was... he was making something for lunch, that was right. He had leaned down to look in the fridge and danced to the song on the radio as he did so: “Stop” by the Spice Girls. A little two-step shuffle of his shoulders that was surprisingly on-beat and fluid. He was always moving, bouncing on his heels or dancing or walking or gesticulating with his hands. Always following some sort of rhythm, even if he had to imagine it. “Yeah. And?” He challenged, returned with some kind of leftover in a take-away container. “I count to four better than anyone else. Don’t be jealous.”_

_“Well, I can see why you’re so proud of it.” Jill took a step away while he was distracted. “Pretty high for a Marine.”_

_Carlos stopped dancing. He turned to her, slowly, his face astonished. “Oh. Oh, so that’s what we’re doing today? We’re gonna fight?”_

_Jill bit back a laugh. “What? I didn’t say anything. Must have imagined it.”_

_Carlos groaned a playful noise like he was mad but was holding it back for her sake. Hmm-hm-hmmmm._

_“…or gotten poisoned from all those crayons you’ve been eating…”_

_Carlos was silent. Then, in a rush of movement, he pushed off the counter and stalked towards her. “Okay. Alright, smart-ass, that’s it. C'mere.”_

_Jill danced away from his heavy footsteps, but he eventually won; wrangled her up and hoisted her under his arm, like he was carrying a kicking, laughing sack of potatoes. “Put me down! Stop, okay, I’ll stop!” She cried, laughing._

_“Nope,” Carlos said, “you had your shot, now you’re gonna learn.” He_ _threw her onto the couch, wrestled her down while she giggled and squealed._

_"Ugh, it’s really hot in here,” he said, “you feel… tired?” Then he collapsed on top of her, dramatic, pinned her to the couch under his oppressive weight. At first she struggled and pushed to no avail, but Jill eventually fell still, save for the feather-light touch of a finger she ran up and down his arm. Carlos lifted his head to look at her._

_“Supposed to beg me to let you up and promise not to call me a crayon eater ever again,” he said, “in case you ain't sure how torture works.”_

_“Oh, I’m sorry. Is you putting your body on top of me supposed to make me stop doing that?” She asked._

_Carlos squinted at her. “Tryin’ to use your feminine wiles against me. Not gonna work, ‘specially when the honor of Connect Four is on the line. Unhand me, woman.” He swatted at her fingers._

_“It’s not… **that game** , of course…” Jill said, “but when you’re done torturing me, offer’s still open for chess. I mean… it’s okay if you feel like Army can beat you. I get it. I totally do. Nothing to be ashamed of.”_

_Carlos’ body became rigid and still. He stared at her with a cool detachment so unlike him it made her laugh._

_“…alright, fucker. You’re on.”_

_They stayed huddled around that board until late in the evening. Best of 3 became best of 5 became “no, no, I got close that time, now I got you”, which then became the insistent mocking clucks of a chicken when Jill suggested she’d embarrassed him enough. Carlos leaned over with his hand on his chin, Jill with her elbows folded politely on the table while she waited for him to move his pieces._

_Over the little marble infantries, between bouts of good-natured shit talking, multiple conversations melted into one long, meandering train of thought that hopped from topic to topic. They could talk about nearly anything. She didn’t need to have her guard up, didn’t need to worry about buffing down the sparkle of her intelligence to a dull glow so he wouldn’t be intimidated. Something she wasn’t used to, but thought she could come to like very much. Had already started to like very much._

_Carlos rubbed his chin and moved his rook. It was a piece he used to great success, favoring the simplicity and effectiveness of barreling in straight lines and smashing against his enemy’s important flanks._

_“Well, I don’t really follow politics,” he replied to Jill's question, “I vote, of course, but I’m not… into it, into it.”_

_“I can fill you in,” Jill said, and took one of his bishops from around the corner of her line of pawns. “Can’t pretend to be unbiased, of course, but…”_

_“We might just not talk about it.”_

_“Oh, we can. Come on. It’s interesting, it’s topical, and we’re both mature enough to handle it, I think.” The parts she didn’t know about him were more interesting than the ones she did — the forbidden, the knowledge kept away from her officer’s brain more tantalizing than that proffered willingly._

_“Oh? Okay. Well…” Carlos looked up at her. “Reagan was a tough-guy poser fuckstick who never did a day of work in his life. Anyone who voted for him is a fuckstick, too.”_

_Jill was taken aback. Offended, like he had reached out with one of his big hands and clapped it across her face. “Uh… I’m sorry? How was Reagan—wait. What?”_

_Carlos just stared at her. His mouth twitched; his hard look collapsed on itself like how a building imploded from an explosive charge. He laughed. “I’m fuckin’ with you. I’ll never care **that** much. But… that tells me we’re on opposite sides of this one. We should leave it like that.”_

_“You’re a Democrat? Really?” The surprise was plain in her voice. She didn't try to hide it._

_“I said…” Carlos moved his rook beside her king from the other side of the board. “Well, first, I said checkmate. But I said we need to quit before we end up hating each other. And you need to focus on your opponent and not get so pissed about shit that doesn’t matter.”_

_“Wow. I actually fell for that.”_

_Carlos stretched and made a noise that sounded like he was satisfied with himself. “And that’s why I don’t talk about politics. Makes smart people get stupid.”_

_“So I guess we found the one topic we can’t talk about, huh?” She said, with a touch of apprehension._

_To that, Carlos quirked an eyebrow, and something on his face was considering. “Nah,” he said, after a moment, “if something’s important to you, I want to know about it. Maybe we can talk about it and figure out why you’re wrong.”_

_“Seriously?”_

_Carlos laughed again. “Way too easy. You’re gonna have to lighten up a little.”_

_~_

  
Jill lifted herself back to her feet. She placed the rook back on his perch, where he watched and protected from the corner of the grid.

***

  
Every time Jill heard a thump of feet up the stairs, her chest would stop moving of its own accord. Eventually they all creaked and banged away for another door. By day seven Jill started to resent the footsteps, an ever-present reminder that would drag her mind back from its distractions, no matter how deep she'd sunk herself into them. 

On the tenth day Jill awoke to human silence and stillness. The wind outside howled and swooped, scraped nearby tree limbs against the window-glass like asking for an invitation. She rolled over and checked her pager and her phone — her new routine before her feet hit the floor. The last text message sent was from her to him, before he had left. Something about dinner plans. Nothing. Dry as a bone.

 _He told you that there was no way to know,_ she reminded herself, _it could take anywhere from days to weeks. This is normal. Perfectly fine._

Jill got up, went to the kitchen. A strange gray darkness too deep for nine-thirty in the morning hung through the window. Jill hit the light-switch for the overhead fixture that flooded the entire front end of the unit. Something sputtered and popped with a sound of breaking glass. Jill peered up to the ceiling, flicked the switch back and forth. The darkness persisted.

"Well, that's great." She said, to nobody in particular.

There was enough light to cook by, at least. Jill pulled out a carton of eggs from the fridge to make breakfast. Her hands shook so hard she dropped it to the floor. The eggs smashed across the gray tile in a splatter of clear white and chalky yellow, ribboned with a trail of red blood. One of the eggs held an embryo that had almost become a chick. It curled in a dead pink conch, its tiny beak visible beneath the shining membrane that had once connected it to the protection of its shell. Jill swallowed, hard, and apologized to it when she threw it in the trash, her hands still shaking.

Jill ordered food instead, under a fake name and a real address. Her appetite was starting to come back — she was nauseous less often and had started craving things. Red meat _(increased hunger for protein?)_ and dairy products and oranges, of all things. But as she sat picking at her food, the condensation rolling down its white Styrofoam container in fat, clear drops, nothing sounded good. Not even this. Especially not this. Her stomach fluttered, locked up like a safe.

She put the food in the fridge, and paced. Wanted to take a nap. Rolled in bed and closed her eyes and came away hot and frustrated. Jill sat up, with a sigh, deeply unhappy, only her restless mind and aching body for company in this tiny white square of the world. 

Against the corner of the bedroom like a taunt sat the cardboard box of Carlos’ things, worn and torn at the flaps. Jill stared at it for a long time. Convinced herself she was helping him — it would be one less thing he had to do when he returned, tired and beat up. It looked ugly against the rest of the apartment. She wasn’t being nosy, she was just helping. It had nothing to do with wanting proof that he _had_ existed, which could be twisted by a hopeful, anxious mind to prove that he _still_ existed. 

She was just helping.

Jill convinced herself for long enough that she picked up the box, surprisingly light, and set it on the bed. She opened the flaps. 

There was precious little inside. A black uniform jacket with red piping and gold buttons. She picked up the jacket to look at it, and two other articles fell out of it, wrapped in its heavy fabric for safekeeping — a long, twisted golden chain with a charm the size of a quarter dangling on the end which thumped to the floor, and a small framed photo. 

Jill lifted the photo from the bed to get a better look. It was washed out in shades of salmon-pink and tan, eaten around the edges with wear and age, seams in the middle of its thick photographic paper as if it had been folded, stored, and retrieved many times. It didn’t fit the frame, too small, but lovingly centered just the same. The photo's subject, a woman with dark skin and a thick, braided tumble of black hair laid over one shoulder, sat in a high-backed wicker chair, talking to someone Jill couldn’t see. Her thin arms were wrapped loose around a boy in her lap, maybe one or two years old, still not free of the rolls and roundness of very young children. He looked at the camera with the trademark accusatory distrust of those who had not yet learned what a camera was. The child shared many of her features; the burnished tan color of his skin, the spill of dark curls, his tiny eyes tilted down at the edges. That small face grasped at something in Jill's chest, pulled on it. Jill placed the photo face-down on the bed. She felt like an interloper, like she had just looked at the most private of someone's memories, uninvited.

Jill stooped and picked up the necklace in her palm, turned the charm over. She was not religious — a fact that would have broken her father’s heart — but she recognized the Saint on the necklace immediately by his cudgel and her own childhood Sunday School experiences. It was Saint Jude, the Saint of the unwinnable fights and underdogs. He was one of the more popular, the namesake of hospitals and churches and schools for the lost. It brought a baked-in sense of nostalgic warmth, worn almost smooth in the way much-touched and much-cared for things were. 

Jill wondered why he wasn’t wearing it.

Without her knowledge, Jill had gotten very close to this necklace, once upon a time. Even touched it once or twice with her forehead, left streaks of her dying fever sweat against its twinkling rope. In its way, life had wound around in a circle, and while she had no way to know it, had placed her exactly where she needed to be, when she needed to be there. 

Jill didn’t want to let the necklace go, quieted by its comfort, but did all the same. Tucked the photo and the coil of the chain back into the uniform, placed them in the box. It was then her mind was struck with the sudden image of this uniform, these articles, being presented to someone — perhaps her — as his last. All boxed up for safekeeping. Jill started away from the box, afraid to touch it, then pushed it into the corner where Carlos had left it. Jill was not superstitious and did not believe in omens, but nonetheless was suddenly uncomfortable with the idea of having touched the effects without him present.

  
***

  
A storm rolled through on that tenth day, rattled the trees and beat the ground with drumline torrents of rain. Some sort of remnant of a tropical depression, the news said. Jill lit an emergency candle, placed it on the coffee table where it wouldn't get tipped, and lounged against the arm of the sofa, pulled into a sleep that had no preamble or reason for its depth, her phone within reach and its ringer at max volume. No calls came. What awoke her was a heavy thump on the porch outside. It sounded like someone had dropped something. She blinked. Waited for further alerts to strangeness, or perhaps danger. When none came, she checked her phone, then nuzzled her head back down. 

Another heavy thump and a rattle, and a familiar voice. “ _Fuck_. Son of a…” Thump. Jill started onto her elbow in a surprised, excited jerk. She looked to the door.

A woman’s voice, muffled. “You need some help?”

“Nah. Nah, I’m okay. Thanks though.” Pause. “Actually, you mind, uh…” a silvery jingle. “Thanks.”

The lock on the front door jiggled and clicked, and the knob turned. A spill of pale yellow porch light sliced against the darkness of the room, fell in an angle. Jill was off of the couch in a bound and almost crashed into the coffee table knees-first. Carlos appeared, pushed the door open with his shoulder, balanced both his own weight on a pair of chrome crutches under his arms, and the weight of the gunny sack over his shoulder. One of his legs was cocooned in a thick white plaster cast. As she approached, he smiled a smile that was wide and easy, but tired around the edges. 

“Hey, you come here often?”

Jill hugged him around his torso, under his arms. His shirt was warm and damp where it had been pinned between his skin and the foam arm-pieces of his machinery. He set his crutches aside, against the door frame. Hopped a bit on one foot to catch his balance, and crushed her close. 

“The uh, answer I was looking for was ‘here? Every night!’." He joked. "But…”

“I'm so glad you're back,” she said, muffled against the fabric of his shirt. “I know you said you’d be gone for a while, sometimes, but this was longer than the other ones, and—”

Carlos pulled back, probably to say something reassuring. His smile flagged. His gaze traced up and down her face between her cheek and her eyes, and he looked like a man who was searching for the punchline to a joke he wasn’t in on. “What happened to your…” Carlos touched her cheek. The color drained from his face, left a gray pall in its wake, visible even under the shadows of the dim candlelight. He didn't move his eyes away from her neck until she spoke.

“A long story,” Jill said, “let's get you sat down.”

Jill lead him to the couch. Carlos followed her on his crutches, swooping and bobbing like a large heron, his leg cocked back. She turned and waited for him to sit, and the distance of the past week exposed something different about her profile that took him a moment to parse. From the front from her ribs to her hip bones was a solid, flat line. No outward protrusion, not yet, but the lack of a subtle, familiar inward curve. 

“What?” Jill laughed, and looked at herself. There was a difference in her smile, a trick of his mind; there was no difference in the divots of her dimples, of her skin or the point of her chin, but in the eyes that perceived them. “Is there ketchup on my shirt? I had this really good hamburger earlier but it fell apart, and… I should have changed it, but I didn’t, and—”

“Nothing like that,” Carlos said, his interruption gentle. “You look beautiful.” 

It was true. Jill ducked her chin, bashful.

Carlos put his crutches aside, hopped on one foot and lowered himself down onto the couch, hands held out for balance.

“You’re a pro already,” she said. Carlos’ hand drifted to her face, touched the bruise on the sharp edge of her cheek bone.

“What happened?” He asked.

Jill told him the story. She spoke about the man with the sweater — Reynolds, they’d called him — about how they’d tried to buy her, first. About how she’d kept the evidence. The rough skin of Carlos’ fingertips rubbed against the back of her neck while she spoke. When she finished he leaned in and kissed her on the bruised meridian around her throat where the sweater had cinched shut. 

“Where’s this guy now?” Carlos asked. That softness in his voice could have been care or malice. Jill couldn’t tell.

“Dead,” Jill said, “both he and his partner.” Jill paused, hesitated. “They were being ordered by someone in the FBC. I know that for sure.”

Jill anticipated having to convince him. When she went over this conversation in her head, plotted out what she’d say, she had heard Carlos’ voice, clear as a bell: _Nah, that can’t be right. I know them. There’s gotta be something else going on._

She didn’t have to. Carlos nodded, slow, like something he’d expected had been confirmed to his worst cynical estimation, his lips flattened together and his eyes searching the ceiling. 

“You knew about this.” Jill said.

“Not this. But I had my suspicions. They played both of us.”

"They _tried_ ," Jill pointed out, "If Umbrella's fingers are in this thing... this is how they operate. But… you’ve been so happy. I thought you liked it there. On the level. You know?”

“Give him a way to feel useful and a man could be happy in Riker’s if he tried. That ain’t a measure if something’s good or not.”

“I spoke to Captain Harris, and he mentioned that you two had a conversation about my safety,” Jill continued. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

Carlos’ smile faded and his thousand-yard stare burrowed against the far wall, the rest of his expression unreadable, blank. Jill touched his arm, and he started back to the present time. He took a breath in to speak. Stopped himself. He looked like he was arguing with himself on how to answer — or if he’d answer at all.

“You’re gonna think I’m a psycho. Some kind of stalker, or… or a coward. But the truth is it wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t some noble mission. I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to work for them, but..." a note of hardness curdled his words, "they made me.”

“Made you?” Jill laughed, unsure. “I have a hard time imagining someone _making_ you do anything. How did they pull that off?”

Carlos didn’t laugh. 

“They threatened you,” he said, “that’s how.”

Jill recoiled.

“I... I wasn’t gonna tell you." Carlos said, in a sudden rush, "I didn’t want you to think I felt like you… like you owed me, or nothing. It wasn’t like that. But I couldn’t just leave.” 

“You did this… for me?” She said, distant, like she didn’t understand. “The vaccine I've come to understand. But you changed the entire direction of your life. Why, for someone you just met?”

Carlos had fallen in love with her like a pistol shot as the hot-blooded men from his lineage were inclined, just as his father before him had fallen in love with _his_ mother. So too Carlos had leapt first and filled in the information later. Accepted it as true and bent the facts around it, not come to it gradually with time and careful consideration, like the woman who sat before him. 

“Time’s a bad judge of character.” He said. "Right?"

"So you do listen to me when I talk," Jill mused. It was a cover; her body was coursing with nerves, nervous and cold all at the same time. "You didn't seem surprised when I mentioned the FBC. Why not?"

“They tried to kill us,” he continued, "sent us straight into an Umbrella sweep-up team. Had a mass grave dug outside. Now Harris ain't responding."

" _What?_ "

"It was a trap. I…" hesitantly at first and then faster, like the words were gaining momentum and weight as he let them fall, "I’m lucky I got out of there with just a bum leg… you should’ve seen it, Jill. It was like fucking hell on Earth. There were these… these bugs, and I almost lost a guy. They shot him—got him in his liver, and—and I didn’t—it’s… I couldn’t stop any of it from happening, and…” 

“Hey,” Jill said, and placed her hand on his arm. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. Okay?”

Carlos shook his head, rapid and short, like that wasn’t the point. Then he looked at her and even against the flickering orange shadows thrown by the candle light, she saw the unsure face of the child in the picture, his eyes looking for an explanation, for reassurance, even if he dared not ask for it in so many words.

“It ain’t me I’m worried about.” 

“Hey, hey,” Jill said, and sat up on her knees, beside him. She put her arms around him. 

“It’s hard,” she said, “I know. I know it’s hard. But you have to understand…" Jill paused and thought about how she wanted to phrase it. “It might be hard, but we’re harder. And we can navigate it together.”

“But—I’m no good to you,” he said, “I’m no good to anybody. Not like this. Not when…”

“Your leg will get better.”

“Not just that,” Carlos said, with a vague sense of what sounded like anger. His breathing sped up, even though he sat still, and his face screwed up in a wince of deep emotional pain, what looked like the beginning of tears. He bit and willed and blinked it back, wrestled it and won, but his breath hitched just irregularly enough in the broad of his chest to expose him. Jill traced it down to its root like an infected tooth burrowed a path into bone, and found only pockets of powerlessness, deep and festering, instead. He looked at the bruise on her throat, past it, with an expression of regret. “All of it.”

Something opened, then. Moved in her brain. The bright plaster-white of his cast was a Red Herring, a fool’s distraction sucked up by her mind. His spirit, bright and indomitable enough to carry hers with it when it flagged, was the true injury. Just the latest casualty. An obituary in the newspaper. 

Jill's mind reeled. The thought of something beautiful and rare being trampled by such vile senselessness triggered something deep and guttural. More primitive than anger or rage, more central to her brain than sadness. Something that supported them all. _Enough_ , it said. _Enough._

“I remember something you said once.” Jill said.

Carlos waited, watching her. His chest rose and fell with catches in between, like he was forcing himself to breathe in and out.

“I know you’re tough. But you have to let other people be tough for you sometimes, too.” To his silence, she asked, “Do you remember that?”

Carlos’ expression — the bitterness there that curdled his dark features into something hard — softened. 

“Yeah,” he said, almost too quiet to hear.

“You’ve done so much to protect other people. And now you need someone. Let me be that person for you.”

He began to protest. “But you—”

Jill had always been The Brave One. As a girl, she was a fill-in-the-blank: _“The First Girl To…”_. First girl to win a co-ed track meet at their high school. First among her high school class to join the military. She always went first. She didn’t mind. Not when it was important. And this was important. Important enough to override her fear and her nervousness. _He_ was important enough.

“I’m still me,” Jill cut him off, “and I love you. We’ll get through this — together. Okay?”

A long beat of silence. It was the first time she'd seen him look helpless. 

“You mean that?” He asked, stripped of his normal effusive bravado. There was no lightness in his voice, no finesse, no escape routes. 

Jill nodded. 

“I'd tell you that I love you too,” He said, and it sounded to Jill like nerves, like shaking. Outside, the wind howled at his indecision: _oooooo._ "But, I... but..."

"...it's okay if you don't," Jill said. She was impressed by how still and how understanding her voice sounded, even though every soft part inside of her ribs was collapsing, sinking down, down to the ground. Still The Brave One. "I shouldn't have put you on the spot. I'm sorry. I got carried aw—"

“No." Forceful, maybe moreso than he intended. "No, I do love you. I do. But I need to tell you this. You need to hear it from me, not from some letter. I can't — I can't go into this lying about it like I'm some kind of hero, because I'm not. You need to know who I am.”

"When you'd leave, I... it wasn't 'should I go get her?' it was 'how do I get there?' 'what do I have to do to get there?'. And I'd do it. You could have put a fuckin' ocean in my way, you could have lead me anywhere and I would have gone. I'd find a way. I lied when I told you I did what I did 'cause the world needed you -- that's a part of it, but it's a small part. I used the vaccine and I hurt people and I fucked everything up because _I'm_ selfish, and I needed to know you'd be okay. I worked with the FBC because _I_ wouldn't have been able to live with myself if what _I_ wanted was the reason you got hurt. Even if you were with someone else. There was no thought of even saving that vaccine, or that job, or any of it if it came down to it. So I made my choices. And I stand by 'em. Even if they're wrong, I still do."

"You need to know. You need to be able to decide for yourself. Because this isn't just some 'I love you' thing where I say it and that's it and then you change your mind later when you find out the truth and I pretend like my heart's not broken when you leave. Not because something took you, but because you wanted to go." 

Carlos paused. He couldn't look at her.

"All I want is to deserve it. And if I can't fight for it, I don't know how to. But all I want is... is this. Here. That's it."

Carlos had said he was undeserving. He wanted to _deserve it_ , like he hadn't before. Now, Jill felt the weight: the dragging heft of that question like an iron manacle, the wonder of being gifted something you weren't sure you had earned or knew how to honor. What had she done in her life to warrant such terrible devotion? What could she do to be worthy of it?

Could she?

"All this time?" She asked, voice as quiet as a whisper. She drew closer. "You've been carrying all of that around, all this time?"

"And I'd carry it again," he said, and sounded sad. "I'd do it, if you were on the other side."

Jill pulled him to her and he went, more than willingly; he gathered her up in his arms and they huddled close for a long, long time. Jill thought that if time could freeze like this, she could be happy. But life didn’t work that way. So she drew it all up, the swooping of the wind and shimmering rattles of the trees outside; the flicker of the emergency candlelight; what words she could remember, dancing out of the grasp of her brain in favor of a massive bulwark of pure emotion, technical details replaced by the glowing coals of just _feeling_. The way he'd looked at her when he said it, like giving it away freed him from something heavy. She spun it all up into a memory and tried desperately to store it as deep as she could, the greedy collector’s instinct of a heart parched for human closeness.

“Remember when I said you were braver than I was?” Carlos said, after a while.

Jill nodded against the base of his throat. 

Carlos adjusted himself like if he could hug her into his body, he would — even this close proximity was not close enough. 

“It’s still true.”

Jill wanted to laugh but couldn't find the breath to do so. "I don't think I am," she said, "not anymore."

***

Across town, some days later while everyone slept, a very different sort of emotional relief was taking place.

“Remember, twist your trunk and kick from your flexor. That’s where the real power is.” The trainer said, a bald man with tan skin, dressed in a skin-tight Lycra fight outfit. He held the bag steady. “Try it again.”

Leon was not a man naturally given to anger. Annoyance, perhaps, born from the arrogant tendency of youth to overestimate their own influence and judgment. 

Today, however, Leon _was_ angry. Not at any one particular thing, but at life itself, a sorry and self-indulgent emotional response to too much pressure on a single brain, too much loss in too short a time. Leon’s brain hungered for logic and patterns and order, but instead found senselessness at every turn. Leon was self-aware enough to realize the immaturity of such a state; it was the way teenagers acted. Not 22-year-old men. Leon seemed unable to escape it all the same, despite his insights. 

Leon did as he was ordered: he smashed the instep of his shin into the side of the bag, knocked it out of the trainer’s hands. It swung on its heavy iron chain like a pendulum. “Good!” The trainer said, cheerily. “Again. More glute, this time. Really get in there.”

Most people wouldn’t even be walking after taking a gunshot to the gut like Leon did — but Leon wasn’t most people. The FBC had been very clear about that from the outset in The Agreement. That the start of their relationship was the point where Leon stopped being like other people and started being what they needed. Whatever that entailed. The other guys hadn’t said anything about the shots. The supplements. The surgeries or the training. Hadn’t said anything about any of it. None of them questioned him, and he didn’t tell. It was a good arrangement. Where before there was a hole in his liver, now there was a scar. Just a memory.

If something as important as his liver could grow back that fast, Leon wondered what else might be growing inside him. He decided he didn’t want to know.

Leon kicked and kicked until his limbs were jelly and his clothes covered in sweat. Then they moved onto grappling, where a person ran at him full tilt and he grabbed them in his arms, threw them back onto the ground as hard as he could. Greco-Roman wrestling, they called it. Leon had done some in high school PE class, but nothing like this. Leon grabbed and hurled until he was exhausted and could barely move, his muscles stiff and twitching from overuse. The Agreement was for twelve hours of physical conditioning and combat lessons per week. The time in the NEST counted against it, but Leon was not most people. He did twelve over that. 

The training was paying off. His kicks were getting stronger, much more accurate and deadly than his punches. He’d cracked the head clean off a practice dummy, once. Had felt proud after he got over feeling scared. The trainer didn’t seem to care. Probably had seen guys do much worse to living targets, come to think of it.

Leon wondered what that would look like on a living target. It was yet another thing he didn’t want to know, but what he wanted had stopped mattering a long time ago.

That night, Leon had Somewhere To Be. He took a long shower. Dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of a nice jeans, a pair of sneakers, his leather jacket. It was too warm for a jacket, but this particular piece always made him feel put-together, and he needed to feel put-together to go where he was going. 

Leon hopped a subway car and headed down to the Capitol building.

The Congressman’s office was barely lit, the sleepy glow of a desk lamp and not much else against tasteful mahogany furnishings and leatherbound tomes about law and justice and classical ethics. The Congressman was leaned over his desk, poring over documents in a sheaf so thick they may as well have been a book, a pair of rimless glasses perched on the end of his nose. Leon knocked on the open door, not a request for permission but a signal he was incoming, then shut it behind him.

“Oh,” The Congressman said as he looked up. “Evening, Leon. You got down here fast.”

Leon nodded. “I was nearby. You’re busy, so I won’t take much of your time. I uploaded it all to the server you gave me. There’s at least a terabyte of data there. Maybe more.” He paused. “It was bad. But I think we’ve got it. Finally.”

“Huh,” The Congressman crossed his arms, sat back in his chair. “Well, I’ll be. Just in time, too. Any of your teammates see you?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Couldn’t’ve been easy.” The Congressman looked him up and down. “Think you’re ready to testify?”

“I am,” Leon said, earnest and serious. 

The Congressman nodded. “They blocked them all. Your teammates — Umbrella did. Something about patent confidentiality or something of that nature. But you weren’t an Umbrella employee or even technically on the police force, so we got you through.”

“So it’s just me.” Leon said.

“You and a few others.”

“Sounds like bullshit, sir.” Leon said. “If you’ll excuse my language.” 

The Congressman laughed. “Sure does. Same with all these business types, but… coming from a lawyer, that’s a bit of a pot and kettle situation.”

Leon had nothing to say to this particular bit of self-deprecating humor. He nodded with a distant smile, and looked down.

“You’re doing a great service to your country,” The Congressman said, “I want you to remember that. No matter what they throw at you, you’re a god damned patriot. You’ve been through more shit in almost a third of my time than I could ever imagine.”

“I just want it to be over,” Leon said, “I’m no superhero. I just want everyone to be safe.” Leon winced against how childish it sounded. Wished he could reel it back in, have a few more seconds to phrase it another way. Unknown to Leon, he would have many more attempts to sharpen up this particular expression of doubt: this wouldn’t be the last time he’d have this conversation with this Congressman. Not for a great many years. Always the same words, the same intentions, batted back and forth like a tennis match into perpetuity. 

The Congressman just smiled his sandy, paternal smile. “You’re doing your best, Leon. Let me handle the rest. You go get some sleep, and just be ready for tomorrow. Eat a good breakfast. Okay?”

Leon nodded. “Goodnight, sir.” 

“Night, Leon. And thank you again.”

Leon left and closed the door behind him, quiet as a whisper. He disappeared into the dark of the June evening, thankful to finally be done with his task.


	28. Safe Rooms

Washington, D.C.  
June 7, 1999  
7:30am

  
Pine trees. 

There were always pine trees.

An entire pine forest towered in a shadowed jigsaw, solemn like an army of faceless soldiers. It might have been strange to anyone who’d been paying attention; conifers weren’t populous in this part of Indiana. Where it got colder close to Michigan and the upper crest of Illinois, they would start to sprout in jagged hedges that rolled into forests and sprawled over the Canadian border. But not in all Jill’s years spent wrapped in coils of rope, dangling down faces of rock to scoop up exhausted climbers, or the evenings chasing down poachers in their unmarked trucks, or the days spent marching through forests of black-barked trees to smoke a would-be bomber or militia out of their rural strongholds, not once had Jill seen a naturally-occurring pine forest in this part of the country. Not even as a young girl, when she pitched nylon tents and cooked dinners and coffee over campfires with her father in these very forests. No pine trees. Not outside of the Arklay Mountains.

They could have chosen any sort of maple they wanted. Sugar, silver, red. Maybe boxelder. The Midwest had plenty of those, even outside of arboretums and research forests. A sprawl of maple trees rattling in the silvery wind wouldn’t have been strange or attracted attention. But instead Something That Should Not Be Here grew lush and ever present on these hill crests in dark, jagged cutouts, flocked with fronds of blossoming herbs in every color, blue and green and red and yellow, like a carpet reflecting the lights of a Christmas tree. Jill should have noticed. They no doubt enjoyed the unnerving imposition of biology tampered with just so, like a naughty secret to giggle over once you got the full context of the joke.

It didn’t smell like pine trees here. It smelled like damp earth, like the cold spongy hands of coiling mist. Looked alive but smelled dead.

She should have noticed.

Jill had been here many times, but only once had her bootheels actually sunk into this dense mud, still fragrant and pliable from rain. All the other times she’d _remembered_ : remembered the sucking at her boots as she walked, the whips of cool moisture against her skin. Knowing this was a memory didn’t make it any better. She walked anyway.

 _Something big is in that mansion,_ she thought, _I shouldn’t go in there. We should get back on the helicopter and leave. We need to leave before somebody gets hurt._ Then, _There shouldn’t be pine trees. Why are there pine trees?_

Jill walked, undeterred by her worrisome brain, as if pulled on the rails of an amusement park ride. Her foot sunk heel-first into a pat of mud that spread and moved, left her foot half consumed. Jill struggled and pulled her foot free of the mouth she’d created in the ground.

It always began and ended the same way, so much so that Jill understood, vaguely, how this too would end. It started with the strange band-saw forest of trees and ended with the barks; the ripping of flesh from bone, the screams, the growls of wild animals. Some days she ran fast enough, flocked by three men she knew by name. Sometimes they looked like themselves. Sometimes Chris had no face, an expressionless motion blur, but she knew he was Chris, even without the hard green of his eyes or the unsatisfied frown. Sometimes there was no Barry, not that she could see, but she knew he was there enough to question her own mind about his physical whereabouts when he didn’t present. And sometimes, like tonight, it was just Jill, running as fast as she could, sucking in greedy lungfuls of moist, clammy early summer midnight, barreling towards the first port she saw in the storm; an ominous set of filigreed double-doors. Sometimes she made it inside. Often, she didn’t.

Something on her knee, sudden and warm. Blood? Had Wesker shot her, smashed the kneecap out of her leg from behind, made her unable to run? When Jill looked down, there was no blood. Her fatigues were gone, replaced with bare skin. No, a skirt — light brown tweed, her legs folded to the side. A hand rested on one of her knees, its skin dark against the fair complexion of her leg, and she looked up.

“You still in there?” Carlos laughed. “Ground control to Major Valentine. We lose contact?”

“Oh. I—” Jill stammered. The darkness of the forest, the moist air, the inhabited-den smell of the mud, all was replaced with the stiff, fuzzy gray of a car interior, the warm smoky smell of the man beside her. Jill glanced from the heavy, handsome lines of Carlos’ face to the windshield; a bright green air freshener in the shape of a pine tree dangled beside the cab driver's head like a gateway to another time. 

Jill cracked an unsure smile. They were both buckled in the back seat of a taxi cab, she in her best skirt and blouse — an outfit she swore fit more comfortably when she bought it two weeks ago — and he in his black summer fatigues, cargo pants and boots and a black long-sleeve t-shirt. “Sorry.” Jill said. “Just… lost in my own head this morning, I guess.”

Carlos’ hand left her knee, and he laced his fingers in hers, gave a reassuring squeeze. “Can’t imagine, but…” he said, “if anyone can nail these fuckers, it’s you.”

Jill wished she believed him. Wished the bravery would come to her in a thunderbolt, or maybe an encouraging whisper on the wind like in movies. It was easy to be brave when you were running for your life; your brain took over, did most of the work for you, an accident of biology’s tendency to want to save itself first. It _looked_ a lot like bravery. But when you were running _to_ , it was different. You had to build that, to overcome that same brain to do so. It was different. Harder. Some people might have realized this and been lost; some might have collapsed into sobs at the lack of direction, the enormity of the task in front of them. But to Jill, no direction _was_ a direction — a direction forward in solitude. It was only her marching against the firing squad, blindfold affixed and cigarette clamped in her lips. Though others around her could kiss the bullet holes, speak to her in soft encouragement about how brave she was, it would be her blood running down the wall. It was never going to be any other way.

“I’ll try,” she said, and her smile felt weak. Thin, like paper.

Carlos looked at her differently, these days. He didn’t catch glances of her and then look away when she noticed, didn’t open his mouth to speak and then think better of it as often. Now free to evaluate her emotions, free to gift her affection and safety without risking himself, something changed, the way some solids spread more readily under the simple power of warmth. 

“You don’t gotta try,” he leaned his forehead against hers in a gentle bump, “you just gotta remember. Okay?”

Jill’s fingers dug against his hand in a shaking fist. She nodded. 

The cab pulled up alongside the curb and Carlos ducked out first. He had downgraded to a single crutch in the last week, insisted he didn’t need the other. Jill was suspicious he’d land flat on his face, but he ditty-bopped along like he’d been using it all his life, moved fluid and quick as someone with command of both legs, some of his previous swagger returned with this bit of newfound freedom. If anyone could walk on a full-sized crutch and look confident doing it, she supposed it would be Carlos. Jill was envious at the speed he learned to adapt to unfortunate circumstances with cheerful acceptance, like it had been his idea all along. He leaned over and confirmed the cabby would keep the meter running for him, and then they started across the sidewalk and up the white stone steps into the Capitol Building. 

***

There were people _everywhere_. 

“Packed house,” Carlos said, and tried for a smile. He had one good arm that wasn’t occupied by a crutch. He held the door open for her with it. “Popular lady.”

It was a veritable sea of bodies, a murmur of conflicting conversations that wove together to make one large, undulating wall of noise. The beep of machines; the gruff tones of security guards giving directions and directing the minnow-school flow of foot traffic; the snapping of cameras and the clipped, official tones of reporters in formal attire who’d parked themselves in front of the most interesting-looking crowd to give their dire, ominous predictions. It had always fascinated Jill just how official someone could sound while saying nothing.

Some people stood in groups of conversation, clear of the polished white-and-tan tortoiseshell tiles and bricks of the main plaza. There were enough bodies to clog it still, no matter how distanced the clusters began. A bank of men in black business suits with briefcases stood still and silent, watching. When Jill pushed through the door, one leaned to another and gestured in her direction, mumbling into the second man’s ear. The first man nodded, and checked his watch.

“Are all these people here for the trial…?” Jill asked, a question she was sure had been swallowed by the din.

“Yeah.” A nearby security guard answered from behind a rotating belt that led to a large metal box. He had a bulbous nose and tired eyes, and leaned in a way that said this was all wholly unimpressive. Just another day at the office. “Put all your metal objects into the bowl and set it back on the belt, coins, phones, belts. No weapons are allowed beyond this point.”

“Oh…” Jill said. She and Carlos looked at each other. “I uh… I forgot. Here.” They both handed over a 9mm pistol; after a moment’s thought, Carlos unshackled a large black combat knife from the small of his back, under his shirt, and proffered it. Jill expected some sort of warning alarm to sound or for them to get arrested or… _something_. “We’re not in trouble or anything, are we?”

The guard just sighed, tired, checked the guns for safety, and put them in a large lock box behind his station. “Take a note of your serial number and you can get it on the way out.”

“Sorry about that. This crowd’s, uh…” Carlos said, “enthusiastic about the Second Amendment.”

“You don’t say,” the guard said, his eyes already on the next person in line.

They made Carlos place his crutch through the x-ray machine and he balanced on one foot waiting for it to feed through the other side, his leg cast held just above the gloss of the floor like a tentative cat’s paw. Jill poised to intervene if his balance betrayed him, but when Carlos felt her eyes upon him, he glanced aside to her and winked. They passed the crutch back, confident now it didn't contain a gun or a bomb, and he waited for her on the other side of the metal detector’s vaulted steel door frame.

“Lot of people. You recognize anyone?”

Jill didn’t, not immediately.

“Not anyone I know,” she said, doubtful. “Not yet.”

“Hm. I’m sure they’ll pop up,” Carlos said, defaulted to shrugging optimism as a way to thumb his nose at reality rather than a belief in what he was saying. Positivity as guerrilla warfare. “There’s a lot—”

They rounded the corner and Jill was immediately hijacked by a five-man crowd, some in suits and some not, clustered by the intersection of plaza and hallway the way an unsuspecting person might get mugged on their way into a dingy alley; they noticed her first and grabbed from her blind spot, gathered around her like an inquisition. They spoke over and around each other, introducing themselves and their papers and websites in a wall of noise that Jill couldn't parse.

“Good morning,” Though Jill spoke to the people before her, her eyes scanned above their heads. She located Carlos where he watched from the periphery with an expression of hesitant mistrust. The line of his shoulders and the dip of his brow suggested readiness. For what, Jill wasn’t sure. “I... look, I don't really think now's a good time.”

A flurry of questions launched in her direction, overlapping and interrupting one another. One in particular stood out:

“How do you respond to the allegations that you were a part of a set-up? A ‘corporate coup’, as its been called.”

They waited for her response with their pens poised over legal pads, staring at her with intent, hungry eyes.

“A… a what? I don’t know anything about that. Look, I have to go, so—” Jill looked to Carlos again. He took it as a signal, and moved towards them.

“Alright, alright,” Carlos said, loudly, as if he’d seen enough. He muscled apart the crest of reporters with his shoulders and his elbow. One of them cried out in offense as he was moved. “Alright, that’s enough. I gotta steal you from your adoring public for a moment. ‘Scuse us.”

“Just a few more questions, okay?” One of the reporters stood in Jill’s path and held a hand up, either to ward Carlos off or somehow assure him that there was no threat. He stood between them, separated them. Jill didn't know what the man intended -- but what she _did_ know was the look on Carlos’ face, a silent mixture of bewilderment and fury at being denied her safe passage when demanded, indicated just how dangerous a place the man had willingly put himself. “If you’ll give us a few mo—”

Carlos cut the man off mid-sentence, bullied him back like mobile rampart. The two never touched, the smaller man retreated on dancing, shocked steps away from Jill as his assailant advanced. Carlos’ movement was swift and aggressive; Jill thought if you looked up the phrase “get in someone’s face” in the Encyclopedia, that a snapshot of this very scene might have been the picture you found. 

“She said it’s time to go.” Carlos’ accent rounded his vowels and clipped the ending consonants, a verbal presentation of danger as sure as the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail. “You got it?”

The man blinked with a smiling balk. He shook his head, bravery forgotten. “N-no. I mean, yes. No problem. Sorry.” 

Carlos stared at him for a few more illustrative moments, then turned and hustled Jill away through the parting crowd with his arm looped around her lower back. The crowd, interested by such a lurid, dramatic idea as violence in an official government building, turned away with mumbles of disappointment and a smattering of laughter.

“You good?” Jill laughed. “I’m used to you talking other people down from getting in brawls. Usually me.”

“Sorry,” Carlos said, and shook his head. “I know you can fight it yourself, just—they were gettin’ too close, and… just a knee-jerk reaction, I guess.”

Jill looked up at him for a long moment until, self-conscious, he laughed and asked, “What?”

“Nothing.” Jill replied. The interested, appraising tone in her voice said otherwise. She thought she saw him blush, his cheekbones and the tips of his ears flushed a faint reddish-purple. Jill leaned on him as they walked in their pocket of silence through the bustle and the hectic energy of the building. Jill had already forgotten who the initial gesture was meant as a comfort for, she or him, or perhaps both, but it didn’t matter. Carlos must have felt it just as she did: his arm around her waist drew her closer. 

The hallway beyond, tall and wide and hewn entirely of polished marble and gold accoutrements, was empty and silent as a tomb compared to the main plaza. They had built a little walkway blocked off with crimson velvet ropes, a police officer in a bulletproof vest at the walkway's mouth. A sign with a metal base stood beside him: **Authorized Persons Only** **.** In the distance, another man stood near the center of the hallway, as if he were waiting for someone.

“I guess…” Jill said, looking to the rope and the vaulting hallway beyond. “I guess this is my stop.”

When Jill turned back to Carlos, one of his hands was outstretched, a puddle of gold coiled in his palm. Jill tilted her head. Her eyes took a moment to pick its shapes apart into something recognizable: the necklace she’d found tucked away in his old uniform with the quarter-sized charm of Saint Jude. “Almost forgot. Here,” when she hesitated, he said, “go on, take it.”

Jill picked the necklace up. It dangled in a burnished rope from her fingertips. “What is this?” 

“It’s a good luck charm. For when you’ve got something big and important to get done. Always worked for me. Now it can work for you.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Jill ducked her head and slipped the necklace on. It was long enough that it draped over her breasts, down to the juncture where her ribs arced. She tucked it into her shirt, it warmth reassuring against her skin. “I… I actually feel a little better already.”

“Good.” Carlos leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Go get ‘em, beautiful.”

***  
  


Jill took a deep breath, straightened her spine, and forced herself to walk between the ropes like she owned the place. The officer stopped her.

“This hall’s for trial witnesses only,” he said, “I.D. please.”

Jill presented her driver’s license. The officer checked it against two stapled pieces of paper. His expression was suspicious until he reached the bottom of the last sheet, then looked to her I.D, and then her face.

“You’re with Congressman Graham,” he said, and jerked a thumb back to the man in the hallway, “room 2-236.”

Jill thanked the officer. He stepped aside and she walked through his fortification’s choke point. The man in the hallway noticed her as she neared, and sauntered in her direction.

“You must be Jill Valentine,” He extended a hand, the other still in his pocket. He was on the younger side of what Jill was expecting, the symmetrical, approachable kind of handsome that might have been approved by a focus group rather than produced by the random machinery of genetics. His short, sandy brown hair was parted on one side and he was clean shaven, wearing khakis and a light blue dress shirt that seemed a touch too big for him, its sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the first button opened at the hollow of his throat. No tie. Where someone else might have looked frumpy or unprofessional, the Congressman carried an air of formality while still cutting a figure casual enough to put her at ease. “It’s an honor to finally make your acquaintance. James Graham.”

“Good morning, Congressman Graham,” Jill said, and shook his hand. “The pleasure’s all mine.”

“That’s very kind of you, but you’re the hero here — not me.” He said, in an accent that sounded half like home and half like Chicago, or maybe Detroit. “And please, when we’re out of chambers, just James is okay. Or Jim, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay, Jim,” Jill said, and was amazed at the speed with which he’d charmed her, made her feel her own importance was elevated just by being in his periphery, and not the other way around. A politician’s trick, no doubt, but one warmly and smoothly deployed. “Am I the first one here?”

Congressman Graham checked his watch, a heavy-looking dress number with a band made of steel links. The early morning light filtered silver through a patch of the downy hair on his arm. “You and two others, but we still have a few minutes. We can have a coffee while we wait for rest to filter in, if you’d like to come inside?”

“That sounds good,” Jill said, “thank you.”

“Just this way. Oh — looks like we’ve got some more company after all.” 

Jill looked up — at the end of the hallway, a young man wearing a navy blue suit and a matching tie was standing close to Carlos, behind the velvet-rope barricade that blocked off the wing. He was less talking _to_ Carlos and more being talked _to_ , nodding in response, rubbing his fingers together in nervy twitches. Carlos pounded on the young man’s shoulders and pushed the him in the officer’s direction, the way teammates on a sports roster would push a member off of the bench to go make a penalty shot.

Congressman Graham laughed, a soft, sensible sort of chuckle. “You all’ve got your own cheering squad. Should make this easier, huh?” 

_Let me spot for you,_ Jill thought, and smiled, the beginning of her words colored with a laugh of her own. “Let’s hope.”

A hand touched soft and warm upon Jill’s arm, and she turned. A small woman, dark-haired and narrow-boned, opened her mouth and faltered for a moment before she spoke. It was as if a ghost had swirled out of the early morning sunlight and taken solid form, a specter of Jill’s past plucked out of memories and given flesh. “I thought that was your voice,” she said, and tried for a smile, but her voice shook and her eyes glossed with emotional tears. “Hi.”

Jill didn’t ask or wait for permission. She pulled the woman close in a warm squeeze. A dam broke somewhere behind the younger woman's face and she began to sniffle, soft against Jill’s shoulder. If decorum suggested this was untoward, the Congressman made no effort to stop them. He just watched with a distant, whimsical sort of smile. 

“I see you and Miss Chambers are already acquainted,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Rebecca stood up straight, wiped the running mascara with her fingertips. “I’m good now.” She sniffled and swallowed, and then said, “You look great. It’s so good to see you…” _safe? In one piece? Not dead? Still reasonably sane?_ “…I didn’t think we would get to. You know?” She blinked back more tears with a pronounced frown like a baby’s, pulled down deep at the edges.

“But we did,” Jill said, “Raccoon City—”

“—versus everybody,” Rebecca finished her sentence, with a laugh. “That goofy slogan they’d tell us to get up hyped up before an assignment.”

“That’s right,” Jill said.

“We’re waiting for one more,” said Congressman Graham. The young man in the smart business suit stood nearby, and looked away from Jill with suddenness, as if he’d been appraising her while she was distracted. “Why don’t we go inside, have some coffee?”

***

  
There were five chairs inside the Congressman's office, but only four witnesses. Another man named George Hamilton — Doctor George Hamilton, the Congressman had introduced him — a solidly-built, expensively-dressed man with a face that was both intelligent and sad, sat waiting for them. The Congressman introduced the young blond man as Leon Kennedy, a name that didn't strike Jill as familiar then. They sat and sipped coffee and made small talk; Congressman Graham leaned back in his chair, one hand to his mouth. He was smiling and laughing along, his eyes crinkled with paternal lines. Every now and then, his eyes would slip over Rebecca’s shoulder to the clock hung on the back wall.

“Are we still waiting for somebody?” Jill asked. “It’s getting close to time, isn’t it?”

“He should have been here by now,” Congressman Graham said, “but we’ll give him ten more before I make a call.”

After a second, the eyes of the Congressman and the young man named Leon met. Just for a blink. Nobody else noticed; Rebecca’s attention was on the paper cup in her long, thin fingers, and George Hamilton stared at the large framed photo behind the Congressman’s desk. He adjusted his collar to alleviate what looked like a sudden flare of nerves, his expression as pale and blank as a numberless clock face.  
  
But Jill saw it. Her brain seized upon this flicker of information like a snake darting out of a hole to snag a tiny animal, then retreating back to its lair to digest.

The time came and passed. George and Rebecca made conversation about what kind of medicine George practiced — cardiothoracic surgery, which meant nothing to Jill, but from Rebecca prompted interest and delight. Leon was silent.

Eventually, the Congressman pushed out of his seat.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, cell phone in hand. “You all continue. I’ll be right back.” 

Jill watched him leave for the hallway. She crossed her legs and tilted her head, pretended to be interested in the medical conversation happening beside her, but her ears were tuned to the words being spoken outside. A sentence that made sense to only two of the people seated in this small room reverberated back, in quiet tones of politeness: “Hey! Hey, yeah, it’s Jim Graham over at the Capitol. Yeah.” A pause. “Mhm. It’s about Ben. He was supposed to be here by now but he’s not shown or given any sort of word…”

Jill looked aside at Leon for a reaction. He was lost in his thoughts, and her gaze occurred to him all at once, like one might notice an insect crawling on their skin. They shared a moment of eye contact and she saw a vulnerability in his face, until, deferential and guilty, Leon looked away. It was then Jill gathered the distinct impression that this trial was a veneer over something treacherous and confusing, thin and breakable like the skim of new ice over an underground cavern. Jill had no intellectual reason to think this, of course. Something tiny and circumstantial like a stray look would get you laughed out of court. But this didn’t feel right, and Jill had long ago learned to trust what didn’t feel right, however tiny and circumstantial. The pronounced backward-facing lens of regret, the one that projected her past mistakes onto her today and all her tomorrows, demanded nothing less than this constant vigilance.

Silence from outside. “Well, I hope he’s alright. That’s mighty strange for him… I know he got the subpoena, so he knows… mhm. Well, okay. Okay, thanks. Bye.”

Congressman Graham came back inside. 

“Everything okay?” Dr. Hamilton asked.

“Well,” The Congressman replied, nonplussed, “it looks like it’s just us today. We should get up there.”

***

Joint Anacosta-Bolling Air Force Base  
Washington, D.C.  
June 7, 1999  
9:15AM

The cab driver waited, as promised, and drove Carlos to work some seven blocks away. It would have been faster to walk, Carlos thought, but then realized that was off the table for a few months. He watched the snarls of traffic and the scores of people from his backseat vantage, paid his $125 cab fare, and disembarked in front of the base, with the fool's surety that was the most stressful part of his day over with.

When Carlos approached, his guys were clustered around the entrance to the building like a gang of hooligans waiting for a passerby to seize on. Kevin was laughing, leaned on one elbow against the gray brick wall, gesturing with his hands while he spoke. The other three were laughing along.

“There’s the man of the hour,” said one of them as Carlos drew near. “Decided to show up?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Carlos said, “had to go see Jill to the Capitol Building. Trial and all.”

“How’s she doing?” Kevin asked, laughter forgotten for something softer.

Carlos shrugged. “Stressed to all fuck. It was standing room only in that place. Reporters everywhere.” Carlos paused. “Wait, why aren’t you guys inside?”

“Our badges are fucked,” said another man, “we’re just using you for your clearance, big guy.”

“C’mon, you love me. You know you do.”

“Alright, guilty. Kevin especially.”

“Oh fuck yeah, you kiddin’ me?” Kevin scoffed, as if suggesting otherwise was ridiculous, “I’m Heavy’s hall pass. Jill said so. No cuttin' in line, neither.”

"Alright, loverboy," Carlos collected his own I.D. from the wallet in his back pocket. “Here. Try this."

Kevin slid the card. _Eee-ee!_ Squeaked the machine, and flashed red on one of the glass buttons. "Same thing ours did." His brow rumpled, Kevin swiped the card again. _Ee-eee_ balked the machine, and the red light flashed a second time. “Oh, what the fuck.” 

They stood around the machine in confusion and wonder like a gang of animals, poking at an object waiting for it to do a trick or drop a treat. They moved aside when a young woman in combat fatigues and heavy boots, her hair slicked down in a bun, said “Excuse me” and swiped her own card for entrance. The machine sung its happy song, lit up green for her on the first try, and the heavy locks on the door opened.

“Maybe it’s broken,” said one man. “Kinda made a different noise when Kevin slid his.”

Carlos knew better. “C’mon,” he said, nodded to the door before it drifted shut, “let’s go to the office.”

Kevin caught the door before it closed, pulled it open with a flourish. They filed in, down the hallway. The air in here felt weird, like someone had just been gossiping about you before you walked in — they continued past the querying, confused looks of the office workers with armfuls of file folders or cardboard drink holders filled with steaming cups of coffee.

“Can you tell me why I’m getting eye-fucked by every joker in this place?” One of the men mumbled.

“I’d like to know that myself,” Carlos said. A sense of looming dread pricked the back of his neck. “They seen us before. They know we work here.”

Behind the front desk sat a civilian; a larger woman with curly blonde hair and an uncommonly pretty face. She was wearing a pink cardigan over a gray dress, makeup in springlike shades of pastel. She finished what she was typing and then turned her eyes to them. She started, surprised, her eyes flicking back and forth between the group of men at her desk.

“Hi,” she said. Her eyes kept returning to Carlos, distracted. “C-can I help you?”

“Hey,” Carlos said, “we don’t mean to bother you, but we’re locked out. None of our cards are working. Can you help us out?”

“That depends… what’s your name?” She stopped, corrected herself. “What are your names, I mean.”

They went down the line introducing themselves. One by one she searched them, her expression becoming more puzzled with each.

“Uh…” the woman said, with a stammer, “well… it says here you were all… huh. I mean… well, we’re glad you’re here! But…” She squinted at the screen, clacked on her keys and clicked on her mouse, and left them in confused silence.

“Says we were all…” Kevin prompted her to continue.

“It says you were all confirmed Killed In Action...? The order came down to deactivate your cards and dissolve the team payroll, last… week?”

“Dissolved?” Carlos asked. “Order from who?”

“From… from your commanding officer,” she said, like it was a trick question and she was nervous to give the wrong answer, “that’s who has to sign off on it.”

There was a silence, coiled and dark; the men around him all wore a similar mask of realization that gave way to confusion, that gave way to a thoughtful simmering. The woman at the desk thought it was for her, and she pushed her chair away, just by a little.

“I’m very sorry for the mix-up. I-I’ll just call your commanding officer,” she stammered, “we’ll get it figured out.” 

“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t need to apologize, you didn’t do nothing wrong.” Carlos smiled; it seemed to put her at immediate ease. “Everyone’s just a little keyed up with the trial and all. We just need to get this cleared up so we can get out of your hair and get to work.”

“Okay.” She said, the color high on her cheeks. “I’m sorry. This sort of mix-up usually doesn’t happen.”

“Nothin’ to be sorry for,” he reiterated, “you’re doin’ the best you can. Go ahead, we can wait.”

“Thank you.” She dialed a number. Waited. Hung up. Dialed it again, waited. After a moment, she shook her head. “He’s not answering. I’ll go get him, okay? Just one moment.” She stood, wrapped her sweater around her bust as if she was to walk into a stiff, cold wind, and then was gone on a skittering trail of high heel clicks against tile, down the hallway. Carlos watched her go, something not quite right.

“ _Heavy and the secretary, sittin’ in a tree_ …” Kevin sang, settled with one of his haunches on her desk. “You’re cheatin’ on me. I knew it. My mom warned me about you.”

“Ladies love the accent,” Carlos shrugged, “least it got us what we're after.”

“KIA,” One of the men spoke, his tone distant. “Sounds very… sure.”

“It don’t make sense, Heavy,” Kevin said, flipped between nonsense and seriousness with his trademark lack of commitment to either, “… and if something don’t make sense, it’s usually not true.”

Carlos stopped. “That a cop thing?”

Kevin shook his head. “Judge Judy. Good though, right?”

Some minutes later, the secretary returned, her sweater still hugged around her. Her face was pale. Unsure.

“Just...” the secretary said, with a manicured finger extended, and smiled a desperate smile that looked more like madness than happiness, “Just one moment while I get my supervisor, okay?”

Snippets of muffled conversation blinked out under the door, the high notes of the secretary’s voice carrying an emotion that sounded like panic. _No no, not like that — is here. Right outside. They’re asking why …They’re not! They’re right out—!_

The door opened. A woman, rail-thin with a stooped posture and chin length mouse brown hair hustled past the team, down the hall, in a stride that was businesslike and serious. No time for nonsense. The secretary followed, and once she was a distance away, Carlos nodded after them. The team followed. They may get stopped by security, Carlos figured, but sometimes forgiveness was better than permission.

The two women stopped at the door. The door was familiar to Carlos. _Capt. Benjamin Harris, USMC_ its stenciling read, in official-looking gold leaf letters on expensive wood. Carlos wasn’t close enough to see the door, not yet, but had been in there a few times; he wasn't sure what fresh hell awaited them through it, but he knew he had to see for himself.

The secretary opened the door with a key from a collection slung around her wrist on a neon pink corkscrew elastic. The early morning light fell across them from the room beyond, and she looked aside to her supervisor for a reaction. The supervisor, for her part, put her hand over her mouth in an expression of consternation and said nothing.

The team stopped behind the two women, looking over their shoulders into an office that just days before was decorated, studded with medals and honors and paintings. Now that office was barren, devoid of everything except the carpet and the desk. A slant of June sunlight gleamed off of the polished wood with oblivious cheer, lonely motes of dust floating in its wake. 

Carlos shook his head, his lips pressed together in anger, in disbelief. 

“Gentlemen,” Kevin said after a moment. He spoke with a grave note that dipped down so far into disbelief that it surfaced on the other side through a splash of absurdity, and he laughed, unable to help himself. “I believe we’ve been bamboozled.”


	29. The Perfect Drug

Manassas, Virginia  
June 7, 1999  
6:30 AM

Chris emerged from his bedroom clothed in black dress pants and a white button-up shirt. He frowned at himself as he matched the lines of glinting plastic buttons to their holes from the shirt tails up to his neck, the deftness of his fingers handicapped by the slender cast around his wrist. It was strange to see him so formal, and his face suggested it was wildly uncomfortable, like trying to figure out how to put on a complicated Halloween costume. Claire had never seen him wear anything you couldn’t build a house or win a street fight in, outside of a single day ten years ago. A day of dark, smoky churches, the smell of lilies and car exhaust and freshly churned dirt. Maybe it was the same idea. Wearing your Sunday best to bury something. Suiting up for the occasion. 

“You look fancy,” Claire said, tried for breezy but just sounded cautious, edgy. “Going somewhere?”

She knew he was. They’d talked about this until they were both blue in the face. Claire knew her brother enough to know that her suggestions were just that, summarily discarded at whim if he thought he knew better, which he often did. 

“I should be down there.” Chris said. He’d said the same thing to nobody in particular just half an hour ago, but had already forgotten. He hadn’t touched his breakfast, let the eggs and toast get cold without even looking at them. Broken records spinning on their players had mouths but no need to eat.

“I know. I know. Me too. I know Sherry would like to see Leon.” Claire paused. “But...”

“’But’ what?”

Claire was emotionally tired; threadbare, even. Caring for another human being was a hard job when the person had physical issues, but this… this was a whole other host of tired. “Look, I… it’s just this is your whole _trigger_ , okay? Like the doctor said.”

“Don’t use that word.” Chris’ eyes were on the television, half in this world and half in theirs, losing the fight as the minutes ticked by. “I’m not some kind of psycho.”

“I know. I’m just trying to help.” Claire had said that more times this past month than she cared to recall. A whole family of broken records, struggling to play on the same beat up turntable. “You’ve been doing so good and this seems like it’d be… poking the bear, you know? Backslide city.”

“I’m _fine_ , Claire. I’m over it.”

“Its been less than a month. You have to give it more time. Go to more than one appointment, maybe?”

“We don’t _have_ —” Chris raised his voice, a snap of anger just waiting for a target to be taken out on, then stopped, took in a deep, stilling breath. “—we don’t have more time. This is happening _now_. I can’t just _not_ be there. I have to.”

“If we go, Sherry will have to come with us. She’s been through a lot already. I don’t know if I want to take her in there.”

“You can’t just hide her from what they did. She was there. She should see this.”

“She’s _ten_ , Chris.”

“So what? They don’t care how old the people they hurt are.” Yelling, now. No attempt to control it. “This is the world she lives in. She saw it up close and personal. She should get to see them get put away.”

Claire was the level-headed one, or so she thought, so much so that she didn’t notice her own volume creep up in retaliation. “But what if they don’t? What if they _don’t_ get put away? What if they get away with this, too? Do you want to show her that? Do you want to explain _that_ to her? Because I don’t.”

“That’s what happens when you adopt kids, you explain hard things to them. You better get used to it.”

“You’re a fine one to tell me what I should get used to when you don’t even listen to your doctors.”

Then, the pat of bare feet on lanes of hardwood leading from the back of the house. The rub of a puffy, sleepy blue eye with a knuckle, and a soft voice. “If who gets put away?”

“Oh…” Claire said, her tone suddenly gentle, maternal. “Nobody. We were just talking, Sherry. Go back to bed. Okay?”

“You guys were yelling at each other. I can’t sleep when you’re yelling at each other.”

Claire shook her head. “Everyone’s emotional right now, sweetie. The police and the government are asking questions about the bad people who did the bad things last year. Back in…”

“Back at home?” No hesitation. 

“Yeah,” Claire said, softly, “back at home.”

“Are they going to go to jail?”

“Probably. Maybe. We don’t know yet.”

“But we saw it. It’s the truth. Why aren’t they going to jail?”

It was a good question, posed with a child’s understanding of how the world worked, no doubt gleaned from candy-colored pages of storybooks that taught fables about personal responsibility and truth. Where the smiling police officers were always there to help and nobody ever got hurt if people just _Did The Right Thing_ , where anyone could be redeemed if they just asked for it — but said nothing about how so many people didn’t ask for it because they didn’t need it when they had unlimited money. The metal clanging of a cash register was all the saving any of them needed.

The confusion in Sherry’s eyes rendered all of Claire’s explanations weak, transparent, like a lie she’d thought up on the spot in the face of such genuine, formative questions. Finally, Claire glared at Chris and gestured to Sherry, as if to say, _Well, go on, you want her to see it so fucking bad, you explain._

Chris watched Claire with folded arms and then shook his head. “The law is set up in a way so people who didn’t do bad things don’t go to jail,” Chris said, his voice gentler but still charged with an edge of anger, “but sometimes bad people take advantage of that and use it to keep them from going, too. That’s what they’re trying to do right now, but we’re not going to let them.”

Claire sighed. “ _Chris_ —”

“You can’t go into a war thinking you’re going to lose, Claire,” Chris looked back to her. “Because that’s how you actually lose.”

“This isn’t a fucking war. This is lawyers and politicians and all kinds of cloak and dagger bullshit. It’s not that honest.”

“It _is_ a war,” Chris hit her volley back with no failure of energy, as if he were ready for it, “and if you don’t see that, maybe _you_ should stay home and let the rest of us fight it. This is how Umbrella works. They bank on people not having the balls to refuse the money, to write the reports, to go to the trials. They bank on intimidation, on their victims thinking they can’t win, so they don’t even fucking try — and then they _don’t_ win and everything just goes on like it has. I’m not sure where your fucking family pride went—” at this Claire gasped, her mouth wipe open in shock, “but we don’t come from a line of cowards. I’m going to see this through, whether you like it or not. This conversation is over.”

A flare of rage, offended and wounded on her own behalf. “How _dare_ you call _me_ a coward, when I—”

“I want to go,” Sherry interjected in a loud voice, “if it will make you guys please stop fighting?”

The silence was an embarrassed one, and both Claire and Chris looked to the floor.

“Look—” Claire started, “look, we can compromise. Okay? Just… take some extra of your nerve medicine before you go. Then… if Sherry wants to go…”

“Can we go with him? I want to. You said Leon is there. I want to see Leon.”

Claire exhaled. Not quite a sigh. A sister to one, perhaps. “If he promises to take his medicine, yes. We can go.”

Sherry’s plaintive eyes, bright and watery, were hard to look at. Even harder to say no to. “Fine.” Chris said. “You know, it’s a pretty sad state of affairs when your adopted kid is more of a Redfield than you are.” His tone could have been contempt or damnable pity. Claire wasn’t sure which was worse. 

Claire balked. “I’m trying to keep you safe! All any of this was for was to keep you both safe! I left my life behind, on hold, to—”

“There has never _been_ any ‘safe’. It’s bullshit. You have to continually fight for whatever kind of peace you’ve got, or it goes away. And this—” he jabbed an angry, pointed finger at the television, “is us fighting for it. I’ll be in the truck. If you’re not in it in five minutes, you can find your own way.” Chris exited through the front door, slammed it on his way out. 

There was silence again, ringing and complete. In a grease fire burst of explosive anger, Claire kicked the cupboard by her leg, put her foot through it in a shatter of splinters. “God _damn_ it!”

Claire put her hand over her face. It trembled as she tried to still her breathing. Slow and tentative, the warmth of Sherry’s small body leaned against Claire’s leg, thin arms around her waist.

“You’re not a coward,” Sherry said, softly. “I think that was mean of him to say. He should say he’s sorry.”

“Sometimes…” Claire swallowed hard. “Sometimes grown-ups say things they don’t mean to each other when they’re mad, or sad, or… or sick.” _Especially when they’re sick._ “It’s not his fault. We shouldn’t have yelled like that in front of you.”

Sherry hugged onto Claire’s side. “My mom and dad never yelled.” 

“That’s how it should be.”

“No,” Sherry said. She sounded frail and very, very young. “I don’t remember them ever really talking to each other at all. I think I like the yelling more than that.”

***

  
They looped the block looking for a parking space twenty times if they looped it once. A lucky break: a delivery driver in a beat up rust-red Honda Accord pulled out of a parallel-park space on the other side of the street. Chris wedged his truck into the space in aggressive, short movements, the way a man might hammer a chisel between two pieces of rock. Chris shut off the ignition, yanked the keys out, and shoved them in his pocket. His hand was on the smooth metal of the door handle when Claire nudged him hard with the ridge of her knuckles.

“You need to take these before you go in there.” Claire’s fingers were looped around something, obscured it from view. Chris knew what was hidden — an orange-and-white bottle of what the head shrinker had called _anxiolytics_ , little mint green tablets that made the world swim around him like he had camped out on the rocky substrate of an aquarium. Chris needed precious little reason to make enemies, and he had decided early that the pills were his. He hated them. Hated giving up the control they took away.

“I don’t need it.” Chris turned to push the door open again and Claire nudged him, harder. It felt more like a punch, this time. Chris turned to her, angry and ready to fight. Raised in a home where Chris’ flashes of anger were as regular an occurrence as rain, Claire stared right back, unimpressed.

“If you don’t take your fucking medicine, you’re not getting out of that door.” 

“ _Really_.”

“Really. I’ll call in a damn bomb threat if I have to. It’s better than you getting thrown in prison for the rest of your life for hopping a barricade and breaking someone Umbrella stooge’s neck on live TV.” Claire met his eyes. “Don’t test me on this, Chris. This is the least you can do. You’re supposed to be taking these anyway.”

Chris opened his mouth to retort when Sherry, from the backseat, reminded him:

“You promised. I heard you.”  
  
They shared a test of wills, Chris and Claire, their glares hard and unblinking. Chris made a sound of frustration, grabbed the bottle, popped the lid, and dry-swallowed two of the pills. He handed it back.

“There. Happy?”

“Yes.” Claire tested the cap to make sure it was secure, then stuffed the bottle back in her calfskin handbag. “Was that so hard?”

Chris said nothing, got out, slammed the door. Claire rolled her eyes so hard she could feel their lids. She exited her side, and opened Sherry’s door to help her down from the truck’s lifted carriage. “Everything has to be a _fucking_ battle…” she mumbled under her breath, while Sherry pretended not to hear.

Chris left them behind, checked both ways across the street and started up the pile of white stone steps, his head hung low and his hands in his pockets. This was a shitty way to start what would no doubt be a shitty day. A shitty few weeks. Chris tried to take a deep breath, but decided he wanted a smoke instead. He was rifling through his pockets when a voice called for him.

“Hey, hey buddy,” it said, behind him, somewhere between paternal gentleness and the boom of an overpowered car stereo. “Excuse me. You got a dollar I can borrow? ” _Bore-o._

Chris turned around to tell whoever it was to fuck off, to spit the poison welling in his chest at someone who deserved it without realizing that when he was in one of these moods _everyone_ deserved it, somehow. He turned, opened his mouth — and stopped. The man behind him had managed to find a suit he could squeeze over his bear-like frame, thick arms and shoulders and the muscular heft of a pot belly he couldn’t ever seem to get rid of, fueled by too much beer and too much hearty food. His hair was a little more gray, still slicked back in its customary style, but he’d grown a full beard to match it — something STARS regs would never allow them. 

“Damndest thing, these parking meters.” Barry said, smiling. “Only take American quarters.”

“Holy fuck…” Chris said in disbelief, anger temporarily forgotten, “holy fuck, Barry!” Chris yelled, with a laugh. “When’d you get here?! I thought you were in Canada!” 

“I was. Well, am. But you think I’d miss watching these jackasses get their teeth kicked in? Not for the _world_.” 

Claire and Sherry drifted to Chris’ side. Claire’s eyes were expectant, asking for an introduction.

“Barry, this is Claire, and this is Sherry. My sister and niece. Girls, this is Barry. We worked together on STARS.”

“Nice to meet you!” Claire shook Barry’s hand. She was not a small woman, five-nine or five-ten, but just about everything about her was dwarfed by the man; her height, the width of her shoulders, the size of her hands.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you both.” When Barry looked down to the small girl at Claire’s side, she pulled back just a touch. “They’re still seating people, so we should be good if we hustle.”

Just then, Chris’ face grew hard. His eyes glinted with a look Claire knew well, like one of those hunting dogs that pointed, stock still, at their downed target to alert their master where it had landed in the brush. Claire followed Chris’ eyes — a guy, tall and wide at the shoulders with half his weight supported by a crutch, bobbled past them. Chris’ eyes followed him down the stairs, his good cheer depleted. If the man felt the intensity of Chris’ stare, he didn’t notice or respond.

“You okay?” Claire asked, her own anger lost in favor of her caretaker’s instincts. “You see someone you recognize?”

Chris shook his head. “I’m fine. Let’s go sit down.” 

  
***

Chris wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but what they were presented was not it.

It was hard not to be offended by how _small_ the room was. Something so important surely deserved the wide-open official cavern of the Senate chambers themselves. The proceedings had been shuffled to a room about the size of a small high school gymnasium, painted a demure shade of eggshell white, its moldings and door frames carved from an expensive-looking glossy red wood. There were large paintings of American historical figures in gold frames hung every few feet. The back half of the room was occupied by a wide, two-tiered desk that looked to seat about thirty people on both of its levels, black leather seats and microphones and name placards set out before the empty spaces. Across the carpeted aisle, a long table that looked like the ones they’d had staff meetings around at the police department stretched in front of an expanse of cushioned folding chairs. Though only a few lawmakers were present, five figures were seated behind that table, ready to go, the folding chairs behind them mostly occupied. Ten of the chairs were set apart from the rest of them, occupied by men in dark suits and briefcases. Umbrella’s men had to be separated from the rest of the crowd. Chris had the distinct impression it might have been their idea.

A low, conspiratorial mumble pervaded the place, and it smelled like nothing at all in here — the clean, lifeless smell of carpet and empty air. Chris and his group took their seats at the very end of the front row. With the absolute lack of decorum native to small children, Sherry hopped down from her chair and sidled down the aisle before Claire could vault out of her seat to collect her. Sherry tipped onto her toes and tapped her small fingers on the shoulder of one of the men seated at the table ahead of them. The man turned; he was an extremely handsome kid and _very_ young, with straw-blond hair and eyes as blue as an ocean stormcloud. He smiled in quiet surprise, affectionately scruffed Sherry’s hair, leaned in close to her level to speak. Claire apologized to the group at the table with the embarrassed, hushed tones of a mother asking clemency for an unruly child, but the man in their center — a politician, probably — waved her worries off with a polite gesture.

“Guess that’s Leon,” Chris said, settling back in his seat to watch. 

“Who?” Barry asked, turned his head and leaned to catch a glimpse of what Chris was seeing.

“Leon Kennedy. Blond the kid at the table. Claire’s RC partner.” Chris said. After a pause, he added: “Think she’s sweet on him.” That was an understatement, of course. Claire talked about Leon _constantly_ , then not at all, the way young people did when they realized they mentioned someone too much in conversation and then oversteered in the other direction as to not look too interested or desperate. Chris couldn’t remember the last time Claire had mentioned whatever the fuck her hippie art school boyfriend’s name was, Joel or Joey or Jordan.

Though Sherry was the catalyst, Claire crouched beside her long after Sherry had lost interest in their conversation, conversed with Leon in excited, smiling whispers until the man beside him tapped his shoulder and whispered something into his ear. Claire gathered Sherry up and they took their leave. Leon watched her go, and when he noticed the two men looking at him, turned back around.

Barry just laughed, low and paternal. “Uh oh. You better watch out, Chris.”

Jill looked back over her shoulder. The straight, glossy shift of her chestnut brown hair caught the light as she scanned the crowd, searched for someone. Her eyes, concerned and darting, fell upon Chris first; she gave him a defensive once-over like she was looking at something unexpected and unpleasant, the sort of procession of expressions one would wear upon opening the door for a visitor and seeing someone trying to sell you something instead. When she spotted Barry, the apprehension in her face faded. Her eyes went wide and she smiled at him, all white teeth and sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks. The immediate difference in her reactions were too much. Chris looked away, heard the shift of Barry’s suit material, the wet sounds of him moving his mouth in silent greeting. 

One by one the lawmakers filed down the carpeted aisle and into their seats. In the center of the double-level desks sat a man dressed in a goofy outfit that looked like a huge white shirt collar over a black cape that draped about his entire body. The man slammed a gavel — Chris supposed he was a judge of some kind, for he had never seen a Supreme Court Justice in person and couldn’t tell you who was currently on the bench if his life depended on it — and called the hearing to order.

“May the defense and the prosecution please stand,” the judge said. The man who had whispered to Leon stood, turned to push his chair back. The lapel pins on the black field of his suit jacket reflected the overhead lights like stars. 

“Let the record reflect Congressman James Philip Graham of Ohio’s fourth district has stood to represent the prosecution. As this is a Congressional investigative hearing of United States v. Umbrella Incorporated, a private attorney has been appointed on the defense’s behalf.” The judge introduced him by name, Arthur J. Miller, a name Chris didn’t recognize but seemed to pique the attention of a few of the lawmakers. A stenographer tapped away at the keys of a word processor, her fingers a blur. “After the hearing has concluded, the matter will be introduced to Congress for a vote on dissolution. The rules are as follows — each question period is to last ten minutes, and after each question the witness will have one uninterrupted minute to respond. Time stops when the witness begins to speak and begins when the witness has finished their answer. Each party will have a chance to redirect after the questioning is finished. Do you agree?”

“We agree, your Honor.”

“Good, then we can begin with opening statements.”

Chris listened to politicians make their politician’s speeches about the keystones: freedom and justice and liberty and fairness. On and on. Chris wasn’t sure if the speeches or the drugs were making him nod off, but the urge was strong. Two pills was a bad idea, but it had gotten the point across. 

***

  
Somewhere Across Town  
Washington, D.C.  
11:42am

They filed into the diner in their black tactical gear, heavy boots and somber expressions, and the people already seated turned away from their food to look, regarded the group with shock and pause. More than one patron did the panicked mental calculus of what role they would take now that the place was being robbed. 

The men clomped to a booth across the checkered floor, threw themselves against the cracked red vinyl seat with the sort of fatigue that made plain even if they _had_ wanted to shake this place down, these guys probably didn’t have the energy to rob a lemonade stand. One by one the strange sets of eyes turned back to their coffees and their hash browns.

The group in black was silent. They stared at the plastic tabletop menus, looking but not seeing, drumming their fingers, rocking their feet.

“I’m getting the french toast,” said one man, “fuck it.”

Carlos looked up to the television mounted on the wall, its picture slightly fuzzed with a thin layer of grease. A Nascar race played over and over on a sports channel, rocket-shaped cars spinning in concentric oblong paths to nowhere. A waitress drifted in their direction, legal pad and pen in hand. She shared none of the anxiety of her patrons; she looked tired and bored. Genghis Khan and Hitler could have gotten a coffee together here and she probably wouldn’t have been able to produce a single, solitary fuck about it.

“Hi boys,” she said to the table in a flat, nasal drone. The frizz of gray hair that had escaped from her bun caught the light like a halo. “What’ll it be?”

“Coffee,” Carlos said, rubbing his face, “just bring the whole pot and some mugs, please.”

“You got it hun. Cream, sugar?”

“Might as well bring that too,” Kevin supplied, “we’re not feelin’ too sweet today.”

They ordered food. Nothing sounded good to Carlos, just another anomaly in a day of topsy-turvy alternate universe bullshit. They’d spent the majority of the morning around a table being grilled not by their CO, that slimy bastard had flown the coop, but by _his_ CO, a hard-faced woman in her mid-50s who demanded answers they didn’t have. She’d yelled and threatened and questioned for almost two and a half hours, eventually let them go when she realized nobody knew what the fuck was going on, or rather, there was no good way to spin Harris going AWOL _not_ being Harris’ fault, and therefore it was now her ass on the line. Political bullshit. Carlos' brain was tired and his head hurt.

All this place offered was Southern stuff, anyway; biscuits and gravy, some sort of sandwich called a “hot brown”, whatever the fuck that was. Grits, fried okra. It all sounded like dirty euphemisms to him, something you’d tell someone to kiss if they’d pissed you off — _Yeah?! Fuck you, buddy, I’ve got some grits for you right here!_

Carlos settled on tried-and-true standbys, enough bacon to choke an elephant, and some toast. Maybe he was coming down with something.

The waitress turned to depart and Carlos called for her. She turned back to the table.

“Hey. Can you put the TV on CNN?” He asked.

“We don’t do politics in here, hun,” she said.

“In D.C.?” Kevin asked, confused.

“’Specially in D.C.,” she answered.

Carlos beckoned her close. She smelled like cigarette smoke, baby powder, and the thick choke of griddle grease. “If you turn it to the trial,” he said, quietly, “Kevin here’ll give you a $20 tip.”

“Wait, what?” Kevin protested.

Wordless, she spirited away as if on a set of wheels under her skirt, back towards the bar. The channel flipped and the race cars disappeared. A pile of expensive-looking redwood desks and podiums appeared opposed by a crowd of people packed into room that was surprisingly cramped. 

“Hey, where’d the race go?!” Protested a patron in a mesh baseball cap and a plaid shirt.

“TV’s broke,” the waitress replied, as if in afterthought. 

The men in the booth turned and watched the television, their conversation forgotten. In the front row of the proceedings behind a man Carlos didn’t recognize, there was a line of usual suspects: Kennedy, who was trying to look neutral but just read as pissed off. Some girl, skinny and pale, with one of those short pixie haircuts that seemed to pop up on every other woman, these days. A guy who kind of looked like an asshole, expensive suit and a facial expression that implied unspoken authority. And then there was Jill, like a bookend carved of some precious material, the best for last. The shitty lighting and the stress didn’t even touch her. Carlos found himself staring, lost in thought. 

Behind them was a host of people, all strangers, divided down the middle. One side with expensive haircuts and straight postures and Rolexes, the other a sea of people with hardened, solemn faces, cheap suits and enough reproach rolling off of them that Carlos could sense it across town. It wasn’t hard to place which side was which. Despite the small size of the room, those hardened people clustered together in the first three or four rows. Carlos wondered for a moment where everybody was — and then it occurred to him that this, save for stragglers like his group… this probably was everybody. Carlos glanced back to Jill’s face and said an inward apology for things already long past and buried, now excavated under the brutal clarity of a single wordless image. He _thought_ he understood — but he didn’t. Not until now.

His heart hurt for her.

“Hey, look! There’s Kennedy’s goofy ass. You see him?”

“Poor kid looks terrified. Look at his face.”

“That his dad’s suit?” Laughter.

“Which one’s Jill? Can you see her? I wanna put a face to the legend.” 

“The one with the uh…” Carlos said, then gestured to his neck to pantomime the level of her hair, “that one. All the way on the left, front row. White shirt.”

A moment of quiet, interrupted with a low, impressed whistle. “ _Hea-vy_. My man.” _Ow-ow!_

Carlos smiled, allowed himself a touch of self-satisfaction. “She likes slummin’ it, lucky for me.”

“And there’s Becky, too, and…” Something low and sentimental hung in Kevin’s voice, a tone that reminded Carlos of looking through old photographs of family reunions. Then it was lost, turned to excited disbelief. “ _Holy fuck, is that George_?”

“Who?”

Kevin paused. “Friend of mine. _Man_ …” then, sudden dawning realization, “we should go down there. We _gotta_ go down there.”

“I’m in,” another replied after shoveling a forkful of french toast into his mouth, “let’s do it.”

“Will they let us in?”

“Maybe. One way to find out.”

Carlos watched the television, then realized they were all looking at him, silently, waiting for him to weigh in.

“I don’t…” he replied to their silence, “I dunno, man. You guys should go. I don’t think if people knew, that… you know…”

“Dost my ears deceiveth me?” Kevin asked. “Heavy… is… is that… _insecurity_ I hear?”

“Shut up,” one of them said, “you’re honorary RC now. Don’t make it weird.”

“Yeah,” said another, “if you feel weird about going… maybe go for Keith. In his stead. You know?”

Carlos considered this. He looked up to Jill’s face on the television; she blinked, looked aside for a brief second, as if searching for someone in the crowd behind her. She turned back around and faced forward.

“Yeah…” Carlos said, nodding, like the idea became a better and better one as the seconds ticked by. He slammed the rest of his coffee and wiped his mouth. “Yeah, alright. Let’s go crash the party.”

***

  
Jesus Christ could these people _talk_.

The judge interrupted the cavalcade of bullshit, ordered them to break for lunch and return at 1:30. Banged his gavel. A sighing rumble rippled through the crowd. People stretched their legs and their spines and their brains, the silence a welcome reprieve. Chris had long ago stopped listening. Everyone’s voices were reduced to a trombone ramble much like Charlie Brown’s teacher from the cartoons of his childhood: _wah wah wah wah_. He looked aside at the stand of Umbrella suits, who had clustered together in laughing conversation. Like it was a joke.

The table of witnesses before them stood. Jill was the last, pushed to her feet with a gingerly sort of care and shook her legs one-by-one as if they’d fallen asleep. Rebecca turned and asked her something — _are you okay?_ — blinked her huge eyes. Jill nodded, said something Chris couldn’t hear.

Claire and Sherry split off without another word once Leon was disentangled, everyone else summarily forgotten. Sherry charged to Leon in a run as he crouched for her at the end of the empty aisle, his arms spread open. Chris had never seen Sherry so happy to see anybody, and in that moment Chris wondered exactly why his sister didn’t pursue this kid instead: he was clean-cut, by all accounts came from a good family, had a good head on his shoulders. If he hadn’t known better, Chris would have assumed they were a family, unafraid of physical proximity or public displays of affection.

Jill and Rebecca found their way over, and exchanged their own hugs, their own effusive exclamations of surprise and joy at Barry’s unexpected presence. Rebecca had some of that for Chris, too — she even kissed him on the cheek — but Jill was conspicuously sedate, her hands folded with demure politeness in front of her skirt.

Chris wanted to be angry at her for so many things. Things he could identify and things he couldn’t, but the drugs didn’t let him, cut it off at the knees. A more lucid man, a man more interested in the mechanism of emotion might have placed those feelings as jealousy — but to Chris, anything other than anger and its family seemed strange and harder to parse with each passing day. It was just a tepid haze of discomfort and apprehension, without a face or a name, but with a voice that wouldn’t shut the fuck up when he was trying to concentrate.

“How have you two been doing?” Rebecca chirped, yanked Chris back out of his own head, her face all smiling, expectant happiness.

 _You two_ , like they were a unit. Chris glanced at Jill, prepared himself to say something, but she beat him to it.

“I’ve been good,” Jill nodded, her voice quiet and sweet. “Just trying to hang in there. You know?” 

“Same thing here,” Chris agreed, “its been… rough. But hopefully this marks the end of it.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Barry said.

“W-well, that’s great.” Rebecca said with an awkward stumble, as if realizing her faux pas long after the moment to correct it had passed. “I’m glad you’re both getting by okay. I was worried about you.”

The Congressman said something to Leon, again, leaned into his ear and then headed for the door. When Leon said his goodbyes, Sherry seemed hesitant to let go of his hand, and his arm trailed behind him until their contact broke.

“I think that’s our cue,” Jill said, “it was good to see you, Barry.”

“Of course. We’ll see you later.”

They followed Congressman Graham out of the chambers in a loose, trailing group. Claire watched them go, and her smile faded.

“So when’s the wedding?” Barry asked, with a laugh.

“Wedding?” Claire blinked back to reality. “What wedding?”

“You might wanna clean up that little spot of drool on your chin.” Chris poked her under her mouth. “It’s okay, he’s out of the room now.”

“Oh, _shut up,_ ” Claire’s fair, freckled complexion washed a deep beet red. “Come on Sherry, lets go get some lunch.”

“Are you and Leon getting married?” Sherry asked, excited, as they departed.

“No. _No_ ,” Claire’s voice was forceful, “they’re just being jerks. Do _not_ say that to him.”

“But why are you blushing?”

Barry chuckled and shook his head. “She seems sweet.” 

Chris scoffed. “Yeah, sweet like a fucking barracuda. Don’t let her fool you.”

“Well, she comes by that honestly. She’s a Redfield, isn’t she?”

To that, Chris had nothing.

“Looks like it’s just us,” Barry continued, “lunch sounds good. You want a sandwich?”

“Sure, may as well. Give us some time to catch up.”

“Right,” Barry said.

***

They sat together on high stools at a table against a window. To Barry's credit, he waited for them to finish eating before he got down to brass tacks.

“So…” Barry’s accent didn’t really come out until he made vowel sounds. Chris hadn’t noticed it before, but given a year’s distance, he could hear it now. _S_ _o_ became _sooou._ “Forgive me if I’m poking a sore spot, but I couldn’t help but notice you and Jill didn’t… say much. That’s new.”

“Haven’t exactly been on speaking terms,” Chris said, “for a while.”

“Ah. Well, that’s a shame. You guys were joined at the hip there, for a while. I thought…”

Chris nodded, gently cut him off. “It’s been a long year. For everybody, I think.” The silence between them was awkward, and perhaps a touch sad. With the new air of someone changing the subject, Chris asked, “What are you doing in the Great White North? Police work, or you go civvy?”

Barry left the previous questions where they lay. “Little bit of both, I suppose. I’m not just here personally. I would be — wild horses couldn’t drag me away from this one, by God — but I was made to come in a more official capacity by our organization.”

“What organization is that?” Chris took a drink of his soda. “The RCMP?”

Chris was being serious, but Barry laughed anyway. “Close.” Barry reached one large, meaty hand into his pocket, rifled around in his brown leather wallet before locating the correct business card, and slid it across the table to Chris. “Think a bit bigger.”  
  


**Bernard “Barry” Burton**  
**Director General, Canadian Operations**  
**Bioterror Security Assessment Alliance**

“Never heard of them,” Chris said. “This is your company?”

“Not mine — I helped start it, but it’ll never belong to any one person, I don’t think. We’re a multinational alliance of countries, solely dedicated to rooting out bioterror. Totally apolitical. Infant stages, though. We’re still cutting through the red tape, but we’re starting to secure funding.”

Chris made a face that implied he was impressed. “Sounds like a big deal. You’ve been busy.”

“God, you’ve got no idea. But it is. We’ve got arms everywhere — France, Britain, West Africa. Everybody saw what happened in Raccoon City, and it struck the fear of fucking God into them, Chris. Especially after that documentary. Even China.” 

“But not the USA,” Chris said. “Umbrella holding it up?”

“I wish that was it — then I’d have someone to blame other than myself. It’s protectiveness, more than anything. I don’t want someone else to fuck it up, I guess.”

Chris squinted. “Why don’t you do it? You’re still legal here, right?”

Barry laughed again, this time a sound of disbelief. “Well, smashing the wine bottle on the Canada branch nearly killed my fucking marriage, for one. I’ve got dual citizenship and I’d love to get a branch running here, too, but… that’s two at once. Maybe if I didn’t have a family. It’s a _lot_ of work — paperwork, field operations, hobnobbing...”

It sounded like a pipe dream to Chris, but he didn’t say as much. Chris wiped his mouth. “Sounds like a big job,” he said, “almost like a politician.”

“It can get that way,” Barry said, helped himself to another bite of his sandwich, chewed and swallowed, then pushed the plate away. “Sometimes. We _need_ a foothold in the U.S., but I’d have to find the right person to do it who we know for a fact isn’t in Umbrella’s pocket. Hard to find someone with enough passion to carry that weight — whatever way public opinion goes.” Barry looked up in a casual enough way that realization didn’t sink against Chris’ brain until their gazes locked in an extended, tense silence. 

“You know anybody like that, Chris?” Barry asked, light and conversational.

Chris crossed his arms, suddenly uncomfortable. “Don’t know. Some people might… believe in the mission and be good at the field ops, but not at the paperwork or the political side of things. Those seem like deal breakers for a candidate.”

“On the contrary, that’s exactly the sort of person we’re looking for. The paperwork is just practice. That can be taught, but the kind of conviction I mentioned? You can’t teach that.” 

“Big ask.” Chris said, after a moment. “Person like that would have to think about it before committing.”

Barry nodded, stood, put down a dollar bill large enough to pay for both entrees and a handsome tip. “I think it’s about time. We should be getting back. If you find anyone you think fits the bill, you should let us know. Sooner, rather than later. I’ll see you back at the court house.” He patted Chris on the shoulder, and then left him alone with his thoughts.

Chris sat at the table a few more moments, his arms crossed, staring at the remnants of Barry’s lunch. Chris had never done any sort of drugs outside of caffeine and enough nicotine to kill a horse, not even smoked trash weed as a teenager, but he knew with elemental intimacy the power chemicals had over one’s brain; how intoxicating the bath of hormones could be when you were engaged in a fight, when you had some sort of crusade to march off on. That same chemical was as addicting as heroin or opiates or methamphetamine ever was. People throughout history had chased that high and didn’t care how many people they’d had to run through to get it. Victory wasn’t the point: victories were thin and fleeting, interchangeable. _Conflict_ was the real bump. Once you got good at it, you had to keep getting hits of it to stay straight and keep the shakes away.

It was what drew him here today, down to this very courthouse. The two parts of Chris’ brain fought one another, a tale as old as chemicals themselves: _No, no, no, this very thing has turned you into someone who hurts **everyone** , not just the people who deserve it. It almost ruined your fucking life, put you in the hospital — you’ve been doing so well, don’t you think this is a bad idea? _

And then: 

_You can quit whenever you want — you’re strong enough to know if this is too much for you, just checking it out wouldn’t hurt, right? When’d you get so scared? Don’t you deserve this for everything you’ve been through?_

Chris looked down at Barry’s business card, tilted it to read the text again without the gloss catching the overhead light. Chris already knew what part of his brain had won, and won as soon as Barry had asked. The sticky business would be justifying his relapse.


	30. Liabilities

The back of Leon’s neck felt hot. The underarms of his suit shirt were soaked and clung to him uncomfortably under his jacket. His stomach wouldn’t settle, no matter how much water he drank or how he’d tried to distract himself, and now that stomach was roaring at him, turning like a small craft on the violence of ambivalent waves. Leon coughed again, felt his throat open and his stomach brace, but nothing came up. The toilet before him ran, a little humming noise of water through pipes, as if to offer comfort. 

He’d been in here too long. He’d knelt here long enough for the cold tile to bite into his knees through the fabric of his pants. He had to get back, or they’d come looking. He didn’t want them to see his weakness, the way his joints had turned to water against his bones, the cold sweat as time grew closer. 

_I know you hate this,_ his father’s voice, gruff but somehow always with that shrugging sigh of “well, I told you so” curled around its edges, _but hating having to do something has never stopped that thing from having to be done. Not once._

It was one of those nuggets of wisdom fathers liked to drop on you, the ones that always seemed to apply to doing chores or taking a punishment quietly, like a good, obedient child. Where was the little pearl of truth about puking your guts out in a Capitol Hill bathroom before being watched by millions of people? Ol’ pops didn’t have anything for that as Leon could recall.

A water faucet turned on outside the stall and Leon knew he wasn’t alone. He cleared his throat, coughed, swallowed. Stood and flushed the toilet. He opened the metal door that blockaded the rest of the bathroom. The brown tweed of a suitcoat faced him, its span over a set of athletic shoulders. A head of thick, dark hair just starting to gray was set atop the suit’s starched and ironed collar. In the mirror, Doctor Hamilton’s eyes were politely averted to his hands. He scrubbed them in the basin, paid great attention to his fingernails. Leon glanced to him, unsure, and then drifted to his own sink. He thought he might get out of here without a conversation. Without comment. Then, the man beside him spoke.

“Are you not feeling well?”

Leon supposed it was a fair question — he was a doctor, after all, presented with a person who’d been gagging and heaving and carrying on before emerging pale as a ghost from his watery crypt. 

“No, sir.” Leon said. “Just nerves, I think.” 

The doctor’s dark eyebrows fluted up, as if this was of note but not worth commenting on. He was a handsome enough man, though most of his charisma sprouted from his bearing rather than his looks; his back was always straight, his gestures polite and measured, and though he spoke scarcely, his few words were mild, considering, and comforting. 

“It’s a lot, what they’re asking you.” Doctor Hamilton said. He looked at Leon’s reflection in the mirror. “I wouldn’t want to go first.”

Leon stood with his hands on the cold marble. “It’s fine,” His voice still sounded froggy, clogged with fluid. “Someone has to.” He turned on the faucet and was vaguely aware the of the doctor’s eyes, still watching from their reflections. 

“How old are you, son?” The doctor asked.

“Twenty-two.” Leon felt much older. Older than dust. His shoulders hurt and his jaw was tight, stiff as a board. The cords of muscles down the sides of his neck ached.

“Hm.” The doctor said. “I’m sorry.”

Leon laughed; a sarcastic scoff. A nervous habit picked up from his days in his home state of Massachusetts where the jokes were drier and the conversation less invasive. “Sorry for what, my stomach problems?”

The doctor shook his head, his expression serious but not without sympathy. “For what they’ve taken from you. _Are_ … taking from you.”

“And you know what they’ve taken from me?” Leon asked, and turned to him. It wasn’t meant as a challenge when the words formed in his brain, but between his tense body language and the quick backhand-slap of his words, it came out as one.

“Time.” The doctor patted at his hands with a thin, scratchy layer of paper towel. “It’s all any of us has. You should be… at a party. Falling in love. Traveling, maybe hiking some trail in South America before you take your first serious job. Making mistakes. Not fixing the mistakes of people twice your age.” 

Leon was quiet. A wounded sort of quiet, the silence of having your guard knocked off and not having a ready-set response. 

_I’m not the hero they think I am,_ he thought, _I’m not the hero I thought I’d be. And they’re all going to see it. Everyone is going to know._

“We’re the same,” Leon said to the doctor, “they took your time, too.”

Doctor Hamilton looked at the paper towel in his hands with a smile. “My time would have been gone either way. Funny what we’re prepared to give up when we don’t realize its value, isn’t it?”

“I don’t understand,” Leon said, but he did understand. He understood so acutely that many things — some feelings without names or faces to identify them, just endless yawns of pain; some just names, names he hadn’t spoken in years and some he’d made a promise to never speak again; some just filling space, where he knew something important went but didn’t remember its shape — came rushing back and became nothing, clogging his brain all at once, both the overflow and the dam. 

The doctor remembered himself, then, balled the towel and shot it into a silver trash can a few paces away. “Never mind me. Just talking to myself, I suppose.” He turned to leave and on his way out, he stopped. “Good luck out there, Leon.”

Leon was left with the tapping of shoes against tile and the polite creak of a door. He searched his own face. He looked tired. Ragged. 

_Everyone is going to know._

  
***

  
They piled shoulder-to-shoulder in Kevin’s shitbird-red Camaro. It smelled like hot plastic and cigarette smoke, a noxious mixture baked into the upholstery fabric. One of the men demanded Kevin turn on the AC.

“Hah! That’s a good one. AC in this thing hasn’t worked since the fucking Gulf War.” Then, “No offense, Heavy.”

“None taken.” Carlos cranked his own window down by its plastic handle before he closed the door. He knew the drill in the Rymanmobile; buckle up, driver picks the music, and don’t ask about climate control. 

“Are you serious?! It’s like a fucking sauna back here!”

“Then roll a window down, you god damned sissy.” Kevin’s words were muffled around an unfiltered cigarette. He twisted one of the radio knobs until the squealing static of dancing stations settled on a song he approved of — something by Motley Crue. Carlos wasn’t a metal guy, much less a hair metal guy, but after repeated exposure in this very car, he knew Vince Neil’s voice through a sort of shameful osmosis. “Alright kids, the ride don’t move until everyone’s buckled up!”

They drove through chokes of indecisive traffic, at times free and easy and then hopelessly gridlocked. As a way to pass the time, one of the men opened the floor for one of the team’s eternal debates: This Girl vs. That Girl. They’d run the gamut in the hours spent huddled together in airplanes or choppers — Maryanne vs. Ginger, Monica vs. Rachel, Kelly Kapowski vs. Lisa Turtle — but they always pulled a new one out of nowhere. This particular teammate had seen a movie recently that had really gotten under his skin, and the debate was an opinionated one that lasted through traffic, up the white stone steps of the building, and to the mouth of the metal detector within its front doors.

“Wait,” Kevin said, at one point, “you’re tellin’ me you prefer _anyone_ to Neve Campbell?”

“Yes. Have you seen _The Waterboy_?”

“Have _you_ seen _Wild Things_? Are you fucking insane?”

The group collected their belongings from plastic bowls and left Carlos behind to wait, for the second time today, for his crutch to pass the machine. He smiled at the guard, who, for the second time today, looked at him with boredom. Carlos scooted on his good foot to the other side of the machine and accidentally bumped a smaller man with the pack of his shoulder. The man jostled and lost his balance, almost fell. 

“Shit. Sorry, man. You okay?”

“Whoa,” the smaller man said, in a heavily-accented voice that struck Carlos in a part of his brain that was both familiar and startlingly unpleasant. “No, no, I’m fine, I—” Doctor Behara stopped, blinked, his mouth open. His tiny, dark eyes set in his deep brown face flickered across Carlos’ own like he expected danger. “W-well… fancy seeing you here, Mister Oliveira. What are the odds?”

“Pretty good, considerin’,” Carlos said, accepted his crutch and tucked it under his arm once again. “I’m alright if you ignore the flat tire. How ‘bout you?”

Doctor Behara’s flinching wasn’t without warrant, of course — there was a time not so long ago the chance of that implied danger might have been pretty good, had the two men found themselves without a glass barricade between them.

“As well as can be expected,” Doctor Behara said, and pulled a leather briefcase from the rotating belt. He eyed the cast on Carlos’ leg, hidden with a black stocking. “Do you need some help? I can walk with you.”

“Good of you to offer, but my guys are just up here.” Carlos reached down deep into the darkest recesses of his social graces, and with Jill in mind, presented an olive branch he didn’t much feel like extending. “But if you don’t mind some company, we’re probably goin’ the same way.”

“Of course.” Carlos’ team meandered ahead, gesturing and arguing and shaking their heads in disbelief, no doubt still entrenched in their debate. “They seem… spirited.”

“You can say ‘dumb’. It’s fine.” 

Doctor Behara slowed his own pace to match Carlos’, realized that he didn’t need to, and fought to catch up. “In your retelling of this conversation, I’d like you to include that _you_ said it, not me.” His laughter faded and then stilled. “I heard what happened. I’m very glad you’re alright. All of you.”

Carlos wasn’t used to being looked upon with sympathy. Wasn’t used to needing it. There was a tentative feeling between he and the man beside him of offenses calming down into some semblance of water flowing under a bridge where it belonged. Behara’s sympathy made that water buck against its shores and Carlos bristled, before realizing _he_ was being the dick this time. He may never get around to being this guy’s friend, but he would have to be okay with being right, accepting that things had happened the way they had because they couldn’t have happened any other way, and shutting up about it. He needed to chill out. 

“Yeah, well,” Carlos said, “we’re tougher than we look. I guess you heard about Harris too.”

“I did. After all that’s happened, I’m somehow… unsurprised he’d refuse to be in a room with you, no matter how official. Or filled with guards.”

“Yeah, you’re givin’ me too much credit. It’s Jill he’s probably afraid of.”

Doctor Behara laughed at that; not his normal social chuckle, nervous and deferential, but an _actual_ human laugh. 

“That had occurred to me, as well.” He said. “She can be quite forceful.”

“Think you win for understatement of the century, doc.”

They arrived at the set of wooden double doors. Two stern-faced guards in dark uniforms studded with golden buttons and badges had stopped the group, and were currently engaged in a lively conversation about it with Kevin. Carlos had a sinking feeling this wasn’t about Faruiza Balk vs. Neve Campbell, and hurried his pace to investigate what sort of issues had cropped up in the thirty seconds he’d left them alone. 

“There you are,” Kevin said as Carlos approached, and gestured to the guards, “this upstanding gentleman wants to talk to our CO and see if we’re supposed to actually be here.”

“It’s just orders,” the guard said, “we’ve been told not to allow entrance to anyone from the FBC without prior clearance. Raccoon City victim or not.”

“Well isn’t that convenient,” said one of the men, “wonder where _that_ order came from.”

“And it’s Raccoon City _survivors_ ,” Kevin corrected the guard, a trifle sharply. “I ain’t never been a victim and I ain’t about to start now. You wanna use titles, use the right ones.”

“I’m their CO,” Carlos cut in, in his best _okay okay everybody calm down_ sort of voice. It would never not feel weird to be depended upon to speak for the group; as much physical and social heft as he carried, he very much disliked throwing it around unless absolutely necessary. “And yeah, we’re all survivors from the outbreak.”

“Alright, _CO_ ,” almost mocking, “let’s see some I.D.”

Carlos presented it and the guard squinted at the card, as if willing it to be untrue or inaccurate, perhaps searching for a disqualifying piece of information.

“If there’s an issue,” Doctor Behara piped up, the dips and inflections of his Indian accent a lyrical contrast to Kevin’s Midwestern chirping and Carlos’ clipped New York baritone. He extended his own I.D. card between his fingers. “I’m also from the FBC. I’m a witness on today’s docket, and I’d be happy to vouch for the gentlemen on my team, here. If that doesn’t suffice — perhaps Congressman Graham could say his piece? I’m sure he’d be very happy to be pulled away from his tiny little Congressional trial to settle a squabble about I.D. cards.”

All eyes shifted from Behara to the guards. The guards too looked away from the group, towards each other. They said nothing, then waved the men forward and proceeded to roughly pat them down. When they found nothing but the squat, hard rectangle of Kevin’s Zippo lighter and a few cell phones, the first man sighed.

“Find a seat on the right,” he said, “left’s reserved for defense lawyers.” 

They continued into the room, past the guards; Kevin scouted and found a copse of empty chairs on the side of the room, indicated them with a point. 

“Thanks, doc.” Carlos laughed, disbelieving. In his mind he had offered a tense sort of peace; now he accepted one, as well. “Seems like we owe you one.”

“Oh. Of course, of course. We’re on the same team, yes?” The doctor said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go have an anxiety attack in front of twelve television cameras. Say my apologies to your men, please.”

  
***

  
There were more lights now. Television lights, hot and bright overhead like mutant fireflies, their split metal jackets like wings, spread against the off-white sky. Leon looked at them unhappily as the witnesses entered the room again in a straggling line. 

“It’ll be okay.” From beside him, Jill’s voice, serious and resonant. “Don’t let them see you sweat. You’ve got this.”

“Wish I shared your confidence,” Leon said.

“Well — if you can’t find your own, maybe you can borrow it from them,” Jill nudged him, soft, with the line of her body, then pointed past Leon’s chest into the crowd. A group of men in black suits were trying to get his attention. Chief among them, Kevin, who pointed to his chest, mouthing the words _“Sign my boob”_. Leon shook his head in bewilderment; you really just couldn't take him anywhere.

“Those your guys?” She asked, with the ghost of a quiet giggle. 

“I think he’s talking to you,” Leon laughed, “but… yeah. That’s my group.”

“With friends like that, who needs a cheering squad?” Jill asked, and brushed past him, on her way to the front row. “See you up there.”

The front table was empty save for Congressman Graham, who sat by his lonesome, reviewing a paper. Leon took his seat at the table, pulled up his chair. There were two name placards before them; Leon tipped them back to read them. _Mr. Leon S. Kennedy_ , said one, and the other, _Cong. James Graham, Chief, House Intelligence Committee_. By himself up here with nobody but a lawyer and a water bottle for company, it felt real now, and Leon’s stomach started to tip again. His blood felt like it fell to his feet and he stared at the table’s lacquered varnish. 

“Just remember — you’re not the one on trial here.” The Congressman said. “Just tell them what you know.”

It didn’t make Leon feel better.

The Congresspeople shuffled in, lackadaisical; no big rush. They took their seats in the black leather chairs, pulled themselves up to the desks, ignored him. In the center in his lifted seat, the Justice settled in, smoothed his robe underneath him like a skirt. Leon had to tilt his face up to look at them, like a jury from old cartoons where they’d point down and scream the guilt for all to hear. He didn’t hear much over the blood rushing in his ears; they asked him to stand and swear on a Catholic Bible, as he’d requested, and he swore to tell the entire truth to the best of his ability. Camera shutters clicked and flashed, and Leon felt like his knees might give out, but he was determined to stand anyway. Once the Justice was satisfied, he sat back down behind the table.

“The first is Congressman Bateman of New Jersey,” the Justice said, “Mister Bateman, you may begin.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.” Said a man with dark hair, combed precariously to cover a bald spot. He had a thin, hawkish nose, and tiny dark eyes. “May the witness state his name and title, please?”

“My name is Leon Scott Kennedy.” Leon said. “I’m a specialist with the Federal Bioterror Commission.” 

“What sort of specialist?” A tone of piqued interest.

“Field operations.”

“That’s a very important position. A very dangerous one as well. You have my thanks as well as the thanks of my colleagues on this panel.”

Leon nodded, uncomfortable, unsure what to say. “Thank you, Congressman.” 

“And can you tell us what your role was in the Raccoon City Incident that dated September 27 to October 1, 1998?”

“I was an officer with the Raccoon City Police Department, sir.”

“So, something curious I notice as I read through your record…” the Congressman said, “is that you don’t really have one, Mister Kennedy. Aside from your service with the FBC, of course. A Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and Sociology from Boston University, quite a bit of volunteer work, but no prior military or law enforcement experience. Calling yourself a police officer from Raccoon City…” the man said, and rubbed his forehead, “perhaps in title? A bit generous for one day of work, wouldn’t you say?”

Any foolish hope of a smooth experience disappeared in a blink, and Leon swallowed.

“Objection,” Congressman Graham said, with a sigh. “Mr. Kennedy was sworn in by Lieutenant Branagh of the Raccoon City Police Department, as is detailed in his statements. Whether or not it was for a day or a year, he was a part of the RPD.”

“Sustained,” the Justice said. “Rephrase, Mr. Bateman.”

“Right, right,” Congressman Bateman said, but didn’t seem sorry; not in the least. “I’ll rephrase. Thank you, Your Honor. Are you from Raccoon City, Mister Kennedy?”

“No. My family is from Boston.”

Congressman Bateman’s face was impressed. “Boston is quite a way from Indiana. Explain?”

“My mother was originally from Raccoon City. She met my father in Boston, at college. That’s where they settled down and raised myself and my sisters. My father died when I was ten, and my mother had to move us closer to her family for help.”

“Back to Raccoon City.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s quite a move just for babysitting help. You and how many other children?”

“Three, my sisters. One older and two younger.”

“And your father was a police officer with the Boston PD.”

“Correct, sir.”

“And he died in the line of duty, did he not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you say it’s fair that you became a police officer to… pick up where he left off?”

“I would say that’s fair.”

“Good. So, if you’ll forgive me for asking — that seems a proud lineage to carry on in his stead. So why did you become a police officer in an entirely different city?”

“To be close to my family.”

The Congressman nodded. “And you lost that family in the Raccoon City Incident, then?”

Leon shook his head. “No. They evacuated to South Bend in the beginning of September, when riots started to break out.”

“And the Raccoon City Police Department called you in despite knowing you had a family to protect?”

Leon shook his head again. “Nobody called me in. I was supposed to start a week earlier, on September 21, but I was told to stay back until the riots were under control.”

“But you went anyway.”

“I wouldn’t make a very good police officer if I ran the other way when people were in danger.”

“Do you also think police officers who disobey direct orders are good police officers?”

A mumble in the crowd behind Leon — perhaps of offense, perhaps of agreement, he couldn’t tell. He waited for the noise to die before he responded.

“It would depend on the order they’re disobeying,” Leon said, “upholding the law and upholding orders aren’t the same thing, though they should be.”

Somewhere in the crowd, Kevin smiled his wide, rakish smile, and nodded in agreement. The Congressman made the mistake of looking into the crowd behind his witness; more than a few of the people glared at him, some pointed and some cool, as if a sacred oath had just been foolishly questioned and the answer stapled to his forehead. 

“So, Mister Kennedy, if you’ll forgive me — clarify something. You wanted to be close to your family but you didn’t evacuate with them. You actually… went back to Raccoon City, despite having no military or law enforcement training at the time, even though you were told to stay away. Almost like someone with prior notice that an incident was going to happen had let them know. Someone who might be suited to a job fighting bioweapons?”

Leon felt his eyebrows knit together. “If someone did have prior notice about what was happening in the city, they didn’t tell me.”

“Can you state your age?”

“I’m twenty-two years old, sir.”

“Hm. You’re a bit young for the FBC. The average age of those who apply and are accepted is…” the Congressman looked at his paper, “thirty-two?” 

Leon didn’t respond, unsure what to say. The Congressman let it hang in the air. “You’re aware of that, correct, Mister Kennedy? That you are, in fact, the youngest FBC operative on record?”

Leon shook his head. “I wasn’t aware. It hadn’t crossed my mind.”

“Interesting. That’s quite an achievement to not realize you’ve attained. Any reason why that you’d like to tell us?” 

No objection came from the Congressman beside him, this time. Leon glanced aside to him, and without looking back, Congressman Graham nodded; a nearly imperceptible twitch of the head. 

“I wasn’t handed anything,” Leon said, “I was conscripted against my will by Captain Benjamin Harris and forced into service on his team after the events of September 1998. I didn’t have a choice. They threatened the lives of my friends if I didn’t comply. Specifically Sherry Birkin.”

A concerned mumble washed over the crowd, but it was no stately _oh my_ sort of mumble; it was an exclamation of dismay, an _are you fucking serious_ amplified through almost a hundred voices, exhausted outrage and consternation mingled into one undulating wall of sound. Among them was Carlos’ quiet whisper: _Jesus Christ_.

“Order,” the Justice said and banged his gavel against a small wooden plate on his desk. When the sound died, he said, “The record will reflect the witness refers to Captain Benjamin Harris of the Federal Bioterror Commission.” 

“Incredible claims require incredible evidence, Mister Kennedy,” Congressman Bateman said. “Where is your proof? If something so… Shakespearean had happened to you, why didn’t you tell anybody?”

“Mister Kennedy’s proof has been submitted to the office of the House Intelligence Committee,” Congressman Graham said. “You are free to peruse of course, but it is… exhaustive.”

“Dating back to when?”

“October 1998,” Leon said. “As soon as I was placed on the team, I made contact with Congressman Graham. I submitted whatever evidence I found to him from that point on.”

“So… you blew the whistle and revealed classified government information, you mean.”

It was a serious charge. Leon could walk it back, of course — do damage control. It’s what they wanted; to get him to recant, to poke a hole in his own story because he was scared. Leon considered this and came to the conclusion that he didn’t care what happened to him. The weight of sacred institutions and titles — Chief, Captain, Congressman — they didn’t matter, either, not if the person holding them demanded the impossible. They were no longer icons to Leon, no longer symbols of honor and trust, and they deserved jack shit if they didn’t operate on the same brazen honesty he did. Not if they didn’t earn it. The room seemed to come into clearer focus, the lines and angles sharper, colors brighter, like a filter removed from a camera lens. Under the weight of the lights, the stares, the questioning, a single seed of rebellion cracked open and sent its first sharp shoot plunging up through the dirt. 

“Yes,” Leon said, plainly. “I did.” His voice was calm, almost challenging — _Yeah. What are you going to do about it?_. As the years ticked by, those that knew Leon closely would remember that tone for how strange it seemed then. How out of character. But as strange things do, it became normal, and they would have difficulty remembering a time where he displayed anything other than that cool self-containment, Leon’s trademark naivete permanently retired for something more sustainable, shut off behind a protective set of blast doors somewhere in his chest. 

Another roiling of mumbles and whispers from the crowd.

“Holy fucking shit,” Kevin mumbled, “Kennedy was a god damned plant the entire time?”

“Sounds like he was there to watch Harris, not help us,” Carlos mused, “always wondered he took so much extra time collecting the evidence when we were in the field.” _And why Harris threw such a fit when I suggested Kennedy lead the team, maybe. Jesus._

“Motherfucker. Just getting ‘boozled from all sides today. _Shit._ ”

“Chill,” Carlos said, “we’re all on the same side. We’ll let him explain, first.”

“Just… makes me uncomfortable, is all,” Kevin said, and crossed his arms. 

“Order, please.” The Justice banged his gavel again. “I understand we are touching on emotional topics, but this will be a _long_ trial if we have to stop for noise control every few minutes, chambers.”

There was silence once again, and Mister Bateman spoke.

“Perhaps later when a judgment requires we review _exhaustive_ evidence, as you so eloquently put it, Chairman, we will.”

Congressman Graham just nodded, smiling. “Thank you.”

“So…” Bateman continued, and Leon thought he sounded… unsure. Shaken, perhaps. “We have your account, but if you would, please recount your experiences in Raccoon City from September 29 to October 1, Mister Kennedy. I’d be interested to hear them from you personally." He gestured, vaguely. "As a refresher.”

 _He’s trying to catch me in a lie,_ Leon realized, _they don’t think I made it up — but they’re trying to find differences in my accounts. Make me look like I embellished it._

Then, clear as a bell as if he were sitting at the table and not in a six-foot burial plot in the Northeast, the same sigh of his father’s voice fluttered through Leon’s head. _The truth knows what to do, kid. Don’t touch it — just let it off its leash._

“I’d be happy to,” Leon said, and settled in for a long afternoon.

***

  
Leon told his story as dispassionately as he could, but we cannot deny our natures, and he was a young man with blood not yet cooled by time or temperance. That blood carried very strong opinions about fairness and justice that were — at least at this juncture of his life — impossible to disabuse. 

Leon spoke for hours, his accounts interrupted with questions that were often disingenuous and sometimes outright misleading. Leon corrected these as best he could, but there were a handful of times his accounts painted him in a poor light. This led to needling over minutiae that made Leon’s head hurt, and sometimes to bitter regrets that were hard to recall without the shakes in his voice betraying him. 

“I notice,” said one Congresswoman, deep into the vault of the fourth hour, where Leon’s brain felt smooth from use and his tongue heavy, “that you are committed to telling the committee about things you did… wrong. Almost like a tell, perhaps. Why is that?”

Leon blinked, as if wary of wandering into a trap that had been laid at his feet, the question so simple after hours of verbal tripwires that it must be deception. 

“The only thing I’m committed to is the truth,” Leon said, “whether or not it makes me look good isn’t the point.”

The courtroom sketch artist, in his swooping scratches of pastel colors, captured very few features more important than the earnest, open look on Leon’s young face. That same artist glanced back later that day at his works and wondered if the witness had really looked so much older than his age under those lights, or if it was a simple artist’s inaccuracy.

  
***

  
They broke for the day. The Justice banged his gavel one last time and the Congresspeople, arms full of papers and briefcases, stood and shuffled off like schoolchildren who had waited overlong for the final bell to ring. There was a mumble of sighs and conversation from behind him, but Leon heard nothing. He was exhausted, his shirt soaked; slippery sweat, not content with only claiming the underarms of his shirt, had trickled all the way down his sides. His mouth was tired and his throat dry despite an entire bottle of water. Where just a moment ago his mind was full of so many facts and emotions and the keeping of both like a high-wire act over a canyon, now it felt deflated, and he was happy to think of nothing. 

After a few moments of companionable silence, Leon said to Congressman Graham: “Sorry. I don’t feel like that was a victory. It felt like barely holding my ground.”

Congressman Graham placed a hand on Leon’s shoulder. “Well, good,” he said, “because we weren’t after a victory. You did hold your ground, and that’s all we needed.”

Leon looked to the Congressman, his summer-tanned skin creased in sleepy laugh lines, the way he looked at you like he was expecting you to answer a question, even if you’d just asked it of him, but laughing all the while, a quiet mirth never far away.

“You can’t have actually _wanted_ a stalemate.” Leon said, disbelieving. “The stakes are too high for that.”

The Congressman nodded. “I can see why you’d think that. But when you’re boxing Mike Tyson, a tie is a victory,” he said, “especially if nobody knows who you are. I’ve been doing this a very long time, Leon, and if I were Umbrella… against who I tried to characterize as a wet-nosed rookie cop, I would have been expecting a slam dunk. And I’d be very concerned I didn’t get one. But for now — it appears you’ve got a welcoming party waiting for you.”

Leon turned and looked over his shoulder to the door. Most of the people in the chamber had risen from their seats and departed into the noisy sea of bodies in the hallway, the room surprisingly open and empty compared to just moments before. Just outside the door, away from the crush of foot traffic, stood a small group of people; Claire. The FBC guys. Jill and Rebecca. At one point Kevin said something that made the entire group burst into a fit of laughter and Claire pushed him by the shoulder. Kevin leaned towards her and said something else aside and she pushed him again. It was a strange series of gestures — Leon was unaware they knew each other, let alone _that_ well — and it quirked something deep in his brain. Interested, Leon pushed to his feet and headed over to the group.

As he walked down the carpeted aisle toward them, Leon caught a hint of strangeness in the air. Perhaps in the wild it would have made an animal turn and bolt the other way, a chemical signal that only danger lay in that direction. The girls turned and welcomed him with warm expressions and waves. The men in the black fatigues also watched him, unsmiling, waiting for him to approach. Kevin and the boys looked at him pointedly, hard and unhappy, like a disapproving clique of popular kids in a high school hallway. Heavy just looked… neutral. Maybe a touch sympathetic, as was his way. 

Leon took a deep breath and braced for impact.

“You did so _good_!” Claire led the charge, enthusiastic and cheerful, her hands clapped together before her chest. “That was amazing!”

“You think so?” Leon smiled, weak, his own doubt overwhelmed for the moment.

“She’s right,” Jill said from where she stood across the circle at Heavy’s side; the Staff Sergeant looked down at her with a mild expression then back up at Leon, a silent assent she spoke for them both. “They tried to throw you off and you held the line. That’s not easy. I’m really impressed.”

“Heavy,” Kevin said, though his eyes were on Leon; slate gray, and… estimating. No laughter in their edges. “Do you think we might call a team meeting to discuss some stuff? Later?”

“Probably a good idea,” Heavy said, not unkindly. This time Jill looked up to him as he spoke. “For now, I think everyone needs some rest. Its been a long day.”

“Oh God,” Jill laughed, “I would pay for a solid nap right about now.”

“Truer words never fuckin’ spoken,” Kevin rubbed his eyes with one hand, pinched their lids together towards his nose with his forefinger and thumb. “There’s about six beers with my name on 'em, and I was just listening. See you guys here tomorrow morning, same Bat time?”

“Sounds good,” Rebecca agreed as she too pulled away. “You guys be careful going home, okay?”

Something happened, then, that turned Leon’s interest into something… harder. Maybe darker. Kevin gestured to Claire to catch her attention as he left. “Talk to you later?”

Claire nodded, cheerful. “Sure thing! Have a good night.”

 _Exactly what the hell does that mean?_ Leon thought, suddenly, then wondered exactly what the hell _he_ meant. He watched Kevin turn and walk away down the tall, polished hallway — his stupid jokes and complete disregard of seriousness in the majority of circumstances had marked Kevin as _persona non grata_ to Leon’s task, long ago — someone to be avoided if possible, rarely taken seriously. A time waster. But now he seemed like danger for reasons unclear. 

“Hey,” Heavy nudged Leon out of his thoughts with his free hand, which he extended in a fist. “Good job today.”

Leon smiled again and bumped his knuckles against Heavy’s. “Thanks. That means a lot.”

The group dispersed, drama and lights and grandstanding packed safely away for another day, and once again Claire stood alone by Leon’s side, as if leaving him by himself didn’t apply or occur to her. She simply smiled at him, fair and bright and dimpled, the thick sheaf of her red hair tossed over one shoulder.

“You really did do good,” she said, “amazing, actually. I’m really proud of you. We both are.”

Something in her face made Leon avert his eyes. He looked around. “Where is Sherry, anyway?”

“She fell asleep about an hour ago,” Claire laughed, “Chris took her home as soon as we broke. She’s too big for me to carry now, so he gets kid-hauling duty.”

“So you and the guys became friends fast,” he said, tried for teasing but only reached sarcastic, drier than he intended. “You and Kevin know each other?”

Claire nodded. She blinked and her smile faded for an expression more thoughtful. “Oh yeah. He’s really nice. He stayed with Chris when he had his accident. Did I tell you about that?”

“You didn’t.”

“Oh! Yeah. When Chris had his… thing… and he fell and broke his wrist. Kevin stayed with him in the hospital until we got there. He’s a really good guy.” A pause. “Something has been bugging me, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Did you ever notice that your entire team is like… super good looking? You guys should make a calendar for charity or something. Put it to good use.” Claire nudged him.

“Good to see your eye is on the prize. Or prizes.” 

“Can’t blame a girl for looking…” Claire trailed off, as if unsure where the conversation was going or why she was defending herself. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sorry.” Leon was aware, with a strange distance like he was listening to someone else speak the words, that he was being an ass. He wasn’t _trying_ to be. He chalked it up to fatigue and frustration, even though a deep part of him knew this wasn't the explanation, and shook his head. “Just tired.” 

“I bet,” Claire touched his upper arm. “Walk you outside?” 

It was an innocent gesture, one of support and sweetness. The warmth of her touch after such an arduous afternoon was a respite; it piped something directly into Leon’s blood, and he realized with suddenness just how empty his own hands were.

“Sure.” Leon said, confused at himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (( Thing 1 - You ever realized how we know like... literally nothing about Leon besides the fact he's a dude and a cop? Lmao I got to this chapter and was like uhhhhh
> 
> Thing 1a - Sorry for the lateness of this chapter — I think this one was cursed, lol. I had an entire chapter written, and my computer decided to eat it :( that’s okay though, I like this version way, way better!
> 
> Thing 2 - Ya girl has a Twitter now! If you wanna follow me over there for general goofin’ and chat and writing/game related stuff, here’s the link! https://twitter.com/luckyfeedback
> 
> Hope you all are staying safe and healthy out there in this craziness! ♡))


	31. Liabilities Pt. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (( This one got chopped into two different chapters because together they would have been almost 14k words [?!]. Also, mild adult content warning wee oo wee oo 
> 
> Sorry for the double-Leon if anyone was expecting more Carlos and Jill -- we're getting back to them soon. I just needed some fluff-adjacent stuff with how messed up current events have been lately. 
> 
> As of 9/25/20 Call and Respond is on hiatus until further notice. No new chapters will be added during this time. Thanks for your support, everyone!))

“Oooooohh,” sang the teasing chorus of nurses clad in their green scrubs. Most of the lights in this wing had been turned out for the night. They stood and sat in faint shadows behind their U-shaped desk, behind computers and phones, waited for the flash of call lights over doors to signal a job to be done, to break the quiet monotony of the medical clinic. One shook her finger in an exaggerated gesture. Shame, shame.

“Do as I say, not as I do,” Raj told them, a cigarette between his thin, knobby fore and middle fingers. “I’ll be right back.”

The June air was spongy, uncomfortably warm when pitted against the cool circulation of the medical facility’s climate. The cigarette didn’t help Raj focus any. He knew it had precious little positive effect on the body; you could say the vasoconstriction of vessels in the brain might help with focus _some_ , but that was junk science and mostly psychological. But the cigarettes still forced him to slow down and breathe, even if what he was breathing in was straight cancer. They gave him excuses to come outside, to take a break from the clinical blear of the computer screen, too dark and too light all at the same time. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, tossed the butt to the pavement and ground it to pieces with the bottom of his shoe, then walked back through the automatic doors.

Raj walked back down the hallway, the soles of his sensible doctor’s dress shoes tapping against the light brown tile, speckled with gray like a robin’s egg. He passed the nurses’ station, now empty, the staff having departed to answer one light or another. Raj rubbed his forehead. He lived in this place, more than his own house. He never seemed to be able to get away. The smell of cleaning alcohol and the insistent drone of the lights were with him even in sleep, these days. With the trial finally here and hopefully over with within a week’s time, whatever way it went, he vowed to spend more time with his family. They hadn’t believed him. Probably shouldn’t have — he’d made that promise before many times, always broken by the insistent needs of a world that refused to stay saved.

Raj walked to his office, sat in his swivel chair, and sighed. Pulled it up to the desk. No sooner had his fingers poised themselves over the keyboard to type had a polite knock sounded against his door.

Raj looked away from his screen to where a nurse poked her head through the crack between the door and its jamb, the dim halogen lights of the overhead tube bulbs casting a white circular sheen on her dark hair like a halo. “Dr. Behara?”

“Yes,” he said, “did you need something, Riley?”

“I noticed you were here late, so I brought you some coffee.” She offered him a styrofoam cup with a thin plastic lid, perforated in a rectangle where one would punch out a drinking spout. “Here.”

“Hm.” It was nice to have someone do something thoughtful for you just because; normally these came with an “oh and I’ve got this rash…” or something similar. Not so from Riley; flighty, sometimes. Sometimes she would call you at three AM for a new order and forget important details — a death knell for a nurse. But she was kind and responsible, which were the cornerstones upon which all else could be built. “Well, thank you. I can definitely use it.” Raj took a drink and searched the overstuffed Rolodex of his brain for her personal details, took a risk on what he found. “How is school going, anyway?”

“It’s… hard,” she said, “we’ve been doing our OB-peds rotation and I do know one thing for certain, and that is I _do not_ want to birth babies.”

“It’s not for everyone, that’s for sure.”

“There’s… a ton of pressure, you know? That’s someone’s baby. They’re always watching you, and then you’ve got all the _family members_ , and…”

She talked, unaware of the tarantula creep on either side of her face, black legs spreading over each cheek in a dwindling dance until they found their perfect spot. Raj opened his mouth to say something — _hey, there’s something on your face just there_ — but they seized on her head before he could, jerked it to the side in one smooth, practiced motion. The deep crunch of breaking bone flooded the air like a stink. Her eyes still open, unseeing, Riley tumbled to the floor with a hard slam. The moment Raj’s eyes left her body, shocked, a muffled electrical sizzle sort of noise — _bzot_ — drove a straight line through the bulk of his forehead. He too fell back, against his chair but only halfway, sending it flinging out from under him against the wall. His body toppled onto its back on the floor tile. The man with the red eyepieces holstered his pistol, stepped over the bodies like stepping over children’s toys strewn about the room, with a mild breed of annoyance. He ripped out the electric blue ethernet cable from the back of the late doctor's computer and attached a piece of electronic equipment to one of its ports, then set upon its keyboard.

His radio crackled to life. “How long?” A voice asked.

He didn’t respond.

“I asked _how long_ , Hunk,” said the voice, annoyed, “I don’t have time to shit around here and wait for you. If you’re not out in ten—”

“Five,” Hunk responded. “Southeast roof.”

“Five it is,” the man said, exasperated, “at 5:01 if you’re not on board, you can kiss your ass goodbye.”

Hunk shut off his radio. While the files moved in animated flight from one window to another, Hunk knelt to his bag on the floor, square and stuffed with angular shapes. Freed one, programmed the bright red timer with his thumbs — five minutes. He stuck it to the wall with a hard slam, then retrieved the length of copper wire from the hallway where he’d left it. He stretched it and hooked it to the box on the wall, its digits scrolling down like a warning.

As the timer struck 3:30, Hunk retrieved his flash drive, tucked it into an armored pocket, and melted back into the night from which he’d come. By 4:50, as promised, he was back on board.

***

Capitol Hill  
About three hours earlier

June was warm and fragrant and mild that year, caught somewhere between May’s soft froths of rain and the whispers of humidity that promised a hot, oppressive July. Some people seemed dedicated to making the most of the early summer, wearing shorts and tank tops despite the relative chill. D.C. in general seemed ready to celebrate the season’s change that was still stubbornly hiding around a corner like a scolded child after the endless grey storms of winter. Even at five o’clock in the afternoon when the sun was still bright and warm, a soft, cool breeze fluttered.

“How are you getting home?” Claire asked as they descended the steps. “Subway?”

“Probably a cab — didn’t drive. The traffic in this city is insane. Not worth the gas.” As if to illustrate Leon's opinion, another car pulled up behind the snarl of traffic currently sitting at a gridlock on the street leading away from the Capitol Building. The new driver honked their horn in outrage, which lead to a choral response of curses and retaliatory honks.

“Hm… are you far away from here?” Claire asked. Leon was used to seeing Claire with her hair tied in a ponytail; as she descended the steps her loose curls bounced and swayed, the bright afternoon sunlight pitching them a color closer to red than her natural rusty auburn. “We could split a cab fare.”

“Not far… maybe a twenty-minute drive. Might have to wait a while for one, though.”

“It’s so pretty outside,” Claire’s eyes were on the beeping, screaming conga line of cars, clotted together like an immovable obstruction in a blood vessel. She laced her fingers at her lower back and turned to face Leon, took a few steps backwards at his pace, the low heels of her shoes clopping against the pavement. “Do… you want to walk? Might make you feel better.”

Leon considered this. “…how would you get home?”

“I meant _with_ me,” Claire laughed, “you could… I dunno, show me around. If you’re feeling up to it.”

Leon didn’t much feel like walking, buffed down by mental exhaustion so absolute it made his body think _it_ was tired as well. Claire was right, though. It was nice outside and traffic was gridlocked in a hopeless tangle. An hour’s walk wasn’t so bad, not compared against the alternative. Maybe he needed to shake off the nerves after an entire afternoon of inert stress. He followed after, his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. “Sure. We could take a walk.”

“Okay! Come on,” Claire smiled and turned back around. “Bet you’re hungry, too?”

It was true, but these days, that was basically always a safe bet.

***

Claire was expecting Leon to trudge along behind her, exhausted. She probably would have, had she a day like he did.

Leon didn’t. In fact, getting out and legging it seemed to give him an infusion of energy. A while back he had removed his suit jacket, and when Claire noted she’d wished she’d taken the forecast into account when choosing her own outfit, Leon offered to carry hers as well. Claire accepted this offer as the quasi-chivalrous kindness it was; while it wasn’t a huge deal, she couldn’t remember the last time a guy had offered to hold a door or give up a seat to her, and she regarded it as strange and flattering. Leon walked with both of their jackets slung over one of his forearms, him in his navy dress pants and fitted pale blue shirt and his tie, she in a pair of tight black slacks and a sleeveless white blouse that exposed the explosion of freckles on her shoulders, a froth of lace at her throat. Claire thought they looked good together, walking in their fancy clothes in the picturesque oil painting sunset, and then forced herself to shake the thought from her head.

A gracious if quiet host, Leon took her by a meal truck nearby where they dined on crepes (she had no idea they made crepes with chicken in them and they were _amazing_ ) rolled into cones and stuck in little cardboard holders. Their walk wasn’t exactly a sight-seeing tour, but the sights weren’t the point, and D.C. was interesting and new enough that everything was a sight to Claire for the first time. They passed crowds of people dressed in bright neon colors who yelled in happy chatter over the booms of electronic music while rainbow flags fluttered from lampposts in the breeze. As they exited downtown, the parties became muted and then petered out. The walk was only supposed to take an hour, but they’d cut enough detours and spent enough time looking at harbors and landmarks that when they ambled down the street towards Leon’s apartment building, the sky had faded from the hard, clear blue of afternoon to lavender and pink, a smattering of thin clouds hanging on the horizon like spun sugar in a carnival stall.

“What’s that?” Claire asked, indicating a neon sign in the shape of a geisha in white-and-red tubular lights, hung over a corner restaurant. The character moved her hand between two positions that made her look like she was waving a fan at her face. “That looks cool!”

“Mexican-Japanese fusion,” Leon said, “If you can believe that.”

“Huh. Like tacos _and_ sushi?”

“Exactly like that. It’s actually not bad.”

“I mean, I like both of those things,” Claire said, though she had a hard time imagining what that would taste like in practice. “Maybe we could go there sometime before I leave. It sounds really good.”

Leon was quiet for a moment, and then looked ahead and peered up, one of his eyebrows cocked and his mouth in a slight frown, his customary expression.

"There’s one of the FBC buildings,” he pointed to a squat high-school sized compound of tan brick. The floodlights had turned on for the evening despite the sun not having completely hidden away behind the horizon, and the wide spots of pale yellow highlighted a single figure in a lab coat, leaned against the wall. Smoking a cigarette, it looked like.

“That’s where you work?” Claire asked, and took a bite of her crepe, wiped a drop of sauce that had escaped to the corner of her mouth with the pad of her finger, sucked it off.

“Nah,” Leon said, “I think that’s their CDC liaison office. If they find someone with the T-virus, that’s where they take them for treatment. They’re the ones that scooped us up after RC.”

“They were nice,” Claire said. “Weird to see it from the outside. It looks so… small.”

Leon said nothing to that. Their trip came to an end about ten minutes around the corner when Leon gestured to a tall building that poked up to the sky through the tangle of small restaurants and grocery stores packed on the block, standing like a brick-red tooth jutting through tan and white skin. It was packed with windows, so tall that just the idea of living on the top levels gave Claire a kind of vertigo. “That’s my building, right there. Did you want to come in for a beer before you go? It was a pretty long walk. I can drive you home if you want.”

At first Claire was extremely surprised. Pleased. She wasn't sure if she would; taking a nice sunset stroll with a handsome guy and then going up to his place for drinks when she had a boyfriend back at home struck her as inappropriate in the instinctual levels of her brain, the outermost layers of tissue. But as the concept filtered deeper, she found reasons it wasn’t weird: Leon was just an old friend. A beer was a beer. She was tired and thirsty, and they hadn’t seen each other in almost a year. Couldn’t a guy and a girl just be buds and have a beer together? Nothing wrong with that. In fact, if anyone did think it was weird, _they_ were the weird one. It was 1999, get a grip.

“Sure,” Claire said, “I’d love one. You, um… up top?”

“Pretty high up,” he nodded, with a soft laugh, “it’s okay. I can keep the blinds down. You’ll be safe with me.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Me? No way.” He tried to keep his face neutral, but couldn’t stop a smile from budding.

“Oh shut up,” Claire said, and shoved him, playfully. Leon jostled along with her shove. His smile however quickly faded into an expression a man might wear when he’s heard something strange; Leon’s eyes flicked around the street, then up to the sky, tracing the thin pulled-cotton clouds.

“You okay?” Claire asked, and touched his shoulder.

Leon nodded. “Just thought I heard something,” he said, mild and thoughtful. He sounded unconvinced. “Come on, let’s get inside.”

***

His apartment was small, but tidy, decorated with furniture that struck Claire as familiar; there was at least one piece of Ikea shelving in here. College habits died hard, no matter how important you became, it seemed. There were no posters or sculptures or art, just a level of paperback novels with well-worn spines and pages fluted from repeated use on a TV stand, under a medium-sized television set across the room.

“Beer okay?” Leon asked, placed their jackets down on the arm of a brown leather loveseat in a neat pile. He walked into the kitchen, rubbing the back of his neck like he was trying to work out a kink. Claire allowed herself a moment to stare at the line of his shoulders, how it tapered down to a strong, trim waist, and considered the idea she could rub his neck for him if he wanted — she wouldn’t mind. Not at all. She entertained the idea of following him in there, but thought better of it; the kitchenette looked small, and the way around these situations was to not put yourself in harm’s way in the first place. Wasn’t that what they said? Not to give temptation a chance to take hold at all was 90% of the fight. Cramming yourself into a 3x3 kitchen with someone attractive was probably the opposite of that.

"Sounds great," Claire said, distraction clear in her voice.

Leon came back with two cans of some sort of brewery IPA with an illustrated label, handed one to Claire, and sat in a reclining chair catty-corner to the arm of the couch. He looked tired enough to fall asleep sitting up, rubbed one of his large, long-fingered basketball player hands across his eyes and brows, down the side of his face. She sat against the couch arm closest to him, curled in his direction.

“I'll ask again," she laughed, "you okay?”

“What a damn day,” Leon said. He leaned his forehead on his hand and looked back to her. “My brain feels like mush. Like someone ran over mush with their car.”

“No kidding. I can’t imagine handling that for a half an hour, let alone five. You did good.”

Leon didn’t move, just smiled at her. “Thanks.”

“Here,” Claire said, and extended her beer to him, “to a job well done?”

Leon was quiet for a moment. He leaned forward and clinked his can against hers; as he moved, the fit of his dress shirt pulled just so against his shoulder, distracted her for a split second. “I’ll drink to that.”

To her surprise, he was the first to speak again, to cut the silence. “So... that fusion place outside, with the sign. Do you think Sherry would like it?”

Claire considered this. “Maybe not,” she said, wrinkled her nose. “She’s a chicken nuggets and french fries kind of kid. I don’t think she’s even had ramen before. We should go, though, for sure.” She took another drink.

“So… correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but that sounds like you just asked me out to dinner.”

It wasn’t meant as an opening, of course, it was just the answer to a question. Claire was so certain she’d hidden her interest in the proverbial sheep’s clothing of close co-ed friendship that the suggestion shocked her like a slap, almost choked her on the bitter froth of her beer as it slid down her throat.

Claire was a strange case; with someone to protect, some goal to achieve, she was indomitable, incisive and goal-oriented. But pitted against someone her equal socially, _romantically_ , all her predatory instincts fled. She fancied herself more rough-and-tumble, more masculine than most girls their age, but flirted in a way that was fluttery and flustered, coming close to the point but never touching it because she hoped the other party would get there first.

“Oh—no,” Claire said, quickly. Her skin was so fair that when she flushed red it was noticeable, even under the failing light. “No, nothing like that. I’m sorry, did I—?”

“Good,” Leon said, gently cut off her ramble, “because then I can ask you and it’s not weird.”

Claire stared at him. “I…” she stammered. The look on his face indicated he was enjoying her reaction, or at least found her stumbling charming. “I… that… okay, that was smooth.”

Leon just smiled, raised his eyebrows as if to say he knew.

“I mean…” Claire laughed, “…are you being serious?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Trial witness, remember? I could even still be under oath, if you want to think of it that way.”

This was new. Uncharted territory. Basically every boyfriend Claire had, serious and not, had hair longer than hers. Or had been in a band. Or lived with five other people and worked at a gas station, earning money for art supplies or weed while they pretended to study or write poetry. Some of them checked all of those boxes.

Like Jamie. Jamie, who was still back in Colorado, who had taken her announcement that she’d be gone for a month to help with her brother's almost life-ending injury with a mild “oh, bummer” and told her he would call her when he could, then asked her for a parting blowjob. Those calls had been every night the first week, at first, slower since then. But he was familiar. His breed was familiar. She knew what to expect from Jamie and guys like him. Getting snuggly with someone so far in the opposite direction that she wasn't sure what to expect seemed like a terrible idea. Claire, however, brimmed with the unwitting optimistic arrogance that she was much more in control of her own destiny than she actually was.

Claire stared at Leon for a few more moments, as if trying to determine if he really _was_ messing with her. He just drank his beer and watched her.

“…yeahhh…” she said, slowly, with a laugh of nerves, “okay. Okay! Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Leon just nodded, smiling. “Okay. Good.”

Immediately, the justifications began. _I mean… dinner is just dinner, you know? You could call it a date but nothing was going to happen_ — it was Leon, for chrissakes, Mr. Boyscout himself — _so no harm no foul._ Besides, Jamie wouldn’t know — he was all the way in Colorado, what would he care if she went out for taco sushi with an old friend? He wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. He didn’t care about that stuff. It would be fine.

Sudden like a thunderclap and much more destructive, a massive cacophonous BOOM followed by a chorus of blood-curdling screams stole any further words, shook the building as if a giant force underneath it were trying to break itself free of a tomb. Leon was half on his feet in immediate reflex, as if to give chase, and then Claire was on her side; her face slapped against the cold leather of the sofa, and she bit her tongue hard enough to taste blood. Everything was dark and warm and smelled like human, like sweet summer sweat and the stiff, heavy smell of freshly-laundered material. A sharp, explosive noise like a rack of dishes crashing to the floor rang out with such closeness that Claire thought the very apartment was now exploding. Leon grunted, pulled her tighter in the circle of his arms, so tight that it hurt, his forehead pressed against her cheek. After a moment of tense silence, filled only with ragged breaths and the soft roar of fire, Leon pulled back from where he lie on top of her.

“Are you okay?” He asked.

“Yeah,” Claire nodded, and looked him in a strange way once the world stopped spinning. “Just got my bell rung a little, I think. I’ll be fine. What the hell was that?”

Leon climbed off of her and walked across the apartment floor, glass crunching underfoot. He strode to the window facing the street, pulled a white nylon cord hanging at its side. Thin plastic blinds stacked into a bank at the top of the window and he leaned to get a better look.

“Jesus,” he said, then turned to her. “Come here. Look.”

“What?” Claire asked, disbelieving, and drifted to his side. In the distance, the foundation of a building roughly the size of a medium-sized high school was all that stood amid a trash-heap pile of white-and-tan rubble. Plumes of fire ate what combustible materials were strewn about. Smoke poured into the sky like a volcanic eruption, tipping under its own weight. The alarms of nearby cars wailed and screamed in a dissonant chorus, their carapaces stacked thick with layers of gray ash that fell into the street around them. Claire shook her head. “But that's... that's where...”

"The FBC satellite office," The ease in Leon’s bearing was gone. It all clamped down into an iron-hardness that made Claire wonder if she was looking at the same person as a moment ago. His phone was in his hand, his thumb already dialing a number with rapid-fire speed. “Give me a minute.”

Claire turned to respond. A constellation of glass splinters twinkled in the orange light against Leon’s shoulders, in his hair — he hadn’t yet noticed the blood running down the back of his dress shirt from where the nape of his neck had been laid open. Comet-tail streaks peppered his back where the glass had hit him, the cornflower blue of his shirt eaten by spreading purple-red blood that bloomed like a bruise. Claire reached up and brushed the sparkling pieces away, his hair thick and straight and smooth against her fingers. “You’re hurt,” she said.

“I”ll be fine,” Leon said, “go take shelter in the bathroom. You can hunker down in the bathtub in case anything else blows in, okay?”

Claire’s world split apart and then swung back together. She didn’t understand his words. Her ears hurt; it sounded like someone had wet a finger and slid it around the rim of a giant wine glass. Everything smelled like sulfur, like someone had lit a thousand matches all at the same time and snuffed them out. The distant whine of a siren.

“Claire?”

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, I’m…” she turned back to the window, her eyes on the scene outside, the summer’s breeze blowing in through the empty space where glass used to be. The red lights of fire engines flickered across her face as their trucks squealed down the street. One woman ran to the truck, wildly pointing in the direction of the compound. Claire wasn’t sure how she got there, but the next scene that made sense was her sitting on the cold coral floor of a stand-up shower, arms around her knees, the white plastic curtain pulled shut.

 _“…just now… it’s gone. Tons of smoke. I think I saw a… …can’t be sure. No, before. I should have… …yeah. One civilian here, with me… think she’s in shock… but… there has to be something I can do, I can—”_ a pause, _“yes, sir. Understood. We'll stay inside and await further orders.”_

Leon returned to her. His shadow moved on the other side of the curtain. He put his phone down and then his form, long and lean, bowed his head over the sink. The tap began to run, and he rinsed his face.

“What’s going on?” Claire asked, raising her voice. That was a mistake. It bounced back to her from every angle of her cocoon, and that wine glass started singing at her again, angry. He came closer, stepped around the curtain and lowered himself to sit beside her, fell the last half-foot with a defeated sigh. Claire looked to him again, to his neck. The divots and scratches had stopped bleeding entirely, dark brown blood dried and caked against his shirt collar. Angry red-pink tissue criss-crossed under his fair skin, but there were no open wounds.

 _There were lacerations there just a few minutes ago…_ Claire thought, _I saw them. Didn’t I? They were there. He was bleeding, and..._

“Your neck,” she said.

Leon rubbed the back of his neck like he’d felt an insect crawling, then looked at his hand, which came away with a few flakes of brown blood. “Guess one or two got me,” he said, dismissive and unconcerned, leaned his long arms on the points of his knees, his hands latched together by their forefingers. “Don’t worry about me. Are you okay?”

Claire nodded and leaned her head to the side, against his shoulder. He didn’t tense against it, didn’t move away.

“Can I ask you a question?” It was easier when she wasn’t looking at him.

“Is me telling you no going to stop you?” He asked with his familiar sarcastic edge, a tiny scoff of a laugh.

Claire thought about this. “Probably not. Was what you said true, today? About why you joined the FBC?”

His confusion was palpable. “About Harris?”

“About Sherry.”

The air had a tentative vulnerability Claire thought she could reach out and touch, run her fingers down like touching the fabric of someone’s garment. “Yeah,” Leon said. “It was.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped you.”

“Didn’t occur to me to,” he said, “I just do what I have to. That’s all.”

“You know…” Claire said, “I keep waiting for you to tell me something… crazy. Like you have a collection of gerbil skulls, or something.”

Leon laughed, sudden and confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve gotta have something weird banging around in your closet. Because otherwise… I didn’t think guys like you existed,” Claire said, “not just guys, but people. You’re just a really, really good person. You just… dove in front of broken glass for me. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like that before you.” There was no reply, and the silence quirked Claire’s curiosity. She looked up at his face, cut from hard, sharp angles, softened by a somber tranquility as he stared at the wall with unfocused eyes.

“Just…” He spoke in response to her imploring look, by way of explanation. Something sounded strange in his voice. Off, like she’d plucked one of his strings and it still reverberated through his throat. “Not sure if I should argue or thank you, I guess.”

“When you’ve got those two choices, you should always do the thanking thing.”

Leon blinked and then turned his head and looked down at her. It became clear in an immediate, nervous way how close their faces were, close enough to feel the warm breath as he exhaled it. From this distance she could see how long his blond eyelashes were, normally so light she couldn’t see them at all. “You think so?” He asked.

Claire nodded.

The quiet persisted. For all his self-assured manner, for his lapse into hard direction and focus when the time called for it — Leon didn’t seem to know what to do with closeness. He just looked at her in a way that read as thoughtful nervousness, of knowing what you _should_ do, but being blocked by a body that wouldn't move in tandem with your mind. In the many times Claire had thought about a situation just like this with this particular man, she had assumed she’d have the strength to say no, to stand firm as a bastion of fidelity, no matter how sorely tempted. She needed little convincing to discard those ideals. As hesitant as Leon was, Claire could never be accused of the same; she took two steps forward to make up for his step back. Laid one of her hands against the far side of his face, turned his head towards her, and kissed him on the mouth. When she pulled away he followed with automatic intent like a flower turning its face towards the sun, hoping to repeat the experience. No fidelity, no shame, no bastions of either. Not here.

Her mind still reeled, clipped in and out of present reality under the pressure-cooker of nervousness and arousal, some moments stretching out and some artificially shortened by her brain’s sense of perception and time. Her body welcomed the disruption, guided by some sort of instinctive autopilot that her mind hadn’t quite aligned with; it came back into focus some time later with her shoulders pinned against the hard tile of the wall, her arms around his neck and her tongue in his mouth, when she felt herself raising her hips to allow his hand to slide down the front of her press pants, his fingers searching for a core that thrummed and jumped and begged. She made a sound she didn’t recognize into his mouth when he found it, gentle and insistent. He responded with a quiet noise of his own, almost too low to hear, that somehow sounded like approval.

It was quick. Would have been quick. His hands weren’t the fumbling hands of inexperience like most of the boys she’d slept with, squeezing too hard with digging needy fingers, shoving and pressing until it hurt but still expecting you to come everywhere as if orgasms were byproducts of bruises. Under that sliding pressure a swollen sort of spreading mounted, demanding and hungry. Claire was suddenly aware she should stop him. Them. If she didn’t stop him now, there would be no stopping. It had to be now, before…

It took every fiber of willpower from every synapse in her brain, already firing overtime. Claire broke away from him and pushed him gently away by his shoulders. A thin string of saliva joined their mouths and then broke as he pulled back from her. She forced her breaths to still. If nerves could speak English, hers were screaming in betrayed shock and grief: _WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?! It was RIGHT THERE! Look, he's still right there, tell him to get back over here and..._

“Is everything okay?” Leon asked. His voice was almost a whisper, thick with something vital.

“I don’t—” Trying to form words was like speaking to him over some sort of jangling, overwhelming noise; Claire supposed it was noise, just not the audible kind. Leon stopped but did not withdraw, and listened to her while she spoke. “I don’t think we should.” She said. An electric shiver fired down her spine.

There was a moment of unpredictable silence. Leon cocked his head just slightly. “What’s wrong?” Concern. It seemed like a silly question in the context of the day, once it was said. He slid his hand up, rested it on one of her hip bones.

Claire had experience with this. Five years’ worth, in fact. Claire knew it wasn’t right, and in a perfect world, a woman could engage in whatever pants-free tomfoolery she wanted and not have anyone think less of her for it. And why not? It was fun. Fun to be the hunter, to chase down targets under a bright Summer moon and have yourself validated in a whirlwind of humid affirmation.

However, Claire was also young. Her formative years, not yet through but close to being, had been tainted by other young people who had not yet learned to leave those close to them in a better position than they’d been found. In that tender experience, one of the unwritten rules of Being a Girl was, well… if you liked the person the fingers were attached to… this was not the way to tip the scales of something more happening in your favor. Not on the first night. At least… this was the truth for the guys _she_ hung out with. Most would take what you gave when you gave it, drain you dry until you could give no more. Cuddle up, speak sweet words, let you wear their t-shirt. Do all the right things boyfriends did while you were in their bed, while you were still within grabbing distance. But then under the light of day, like magic, the goal posts would be dug up and moved. Like a different person had taken their place sometime between the setting and the rising of the sun: _oh I didn’t know you wanted to… uh… I mean, I’m just in a really complicated place right now and…_

Men didn’t even really have to like you to fuck you. That was the sad truth. To conflate the two often lead to heartbreak. To use one to get the other even more so, a wildly misguided mistake Claire had no intention of ever making again. She wasn’t interested in just being handled by this man; she was interested in being _liked._ Maybe more than that.

“I just—” Claire fought with it. “I just don’t want you to think I’m… you know. Easy? I guess?” She cringed at the word. It was a little late for this, she thought, and she waited for some sort of anger. Some sort of begging or cajoling or pleading. Something that started with _wow_ , like she had led him on and now was denying him something he was entitled to.

A slow sort of understanding dawned on Leon’s face, instead. He always looked like he cared about what she thought; really considered it. “I don’t think you are,” he said, “but if you want to stop, we can stop.” Then, “Sorry if I was too... you know. Got caught up in the moment, I guess.”

His hand moved from under the front pleat of her pants, trailed up her stomach and then left her skin. The space there suddenly felt cold without his touch, empty. Claire tried to catch her breath, pounding with blood all over and groping for mental purchase. Her heart hammered like a beast locked in the cage of her ribs, screaming to be let out, her lips raw and wet and swollen. It felt like she’d just won the lottery only to tell the dude with the confetti and massive clown-sized check they had the wrong house.

“No, no,” Claire said, “ha ha… no. That was _really_ hot, actually. I didn’t know you had that in you, that whole… take charge thing. I’m a fan.” She fiddled with his collar, smoothed it down. His expression softened at her words, perhaps a touch flattered or bashful… or both. Part of her wished desperately that he would try to convince her so she would have an alibi. _I didn’t **want** to get fucked within an inch of my life in this really hot guy’s shower but you know what happens when there’s drama and explosions, that’s amore I guess._ “I think I’m just a ‘have at least one date first’ kind of girl, you know?”

Leon didn’t need to be told “no” twice, true to form. “Of course,” he said, and looked suitably abashed. Regret flared hard and bright in Claire’s chest. “We can wait.”

Leon slowly sat back onto his knees, hands on his thighs. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then stood, and helped Claire to her feet.

“’Scuse me,” Claire said, tried for a brightness that vaulted the gap too fast and arrived as nervousness, then turned and zipped her pants back up. He turned from her while she did, gave her privacy. “Is the option to take me home still on the table? I’d stay, but… you know...”

Leon chuckled. “I get it. Probably not a good idea, if... 'you know'.”

Like a tic, wincing. “Sorry.”

Leon just smiled again. He had a presence you could feel, clean and tucked-in with no messy hems. Where before the way he regarded her was mild and polite, now there was something else behind his eyes, behind the way he moved, as if everything had been shifted just a little bit closer, the heat dialed up by just a few degrees. Claire thought again about her tendency to think of it as hunting… but she wasn’t sure she was the chasing party. Not anymore.

“It happens.” He said. “I’ll go down and check. If my car is still working, I can take you.”

 _So much for Mr. Boyscout_ , Claire thought, bewildered, _wonder where he earned THAT merit badge?_

***

Once the glass was cleaned off the seats, Leon’s car was indeed capable of movement. It was parked far enough away that the windshield avoided being smashed in, but he avoided the highway in case it had taken structural damage that high speeds would exacerbate. He was full of practical, quick smarts like that, always thinking a step or two ahead and adjusting accordingly.

The drive was awful. Torture, even. Every nerve in Claire’s body from her waist to her toes was upset, their complaints becoming duller and more muted with time, stretched into a dissonant ache. More than once she spotted a place that they could pull off the road, into an abandoned lot or onto the back road of a park where she could finish the job for both of them, her mind preoccupied, on a loop with the idea.

Saying no was a bad choice, but it was the right one. While sure, what had happened _was_ cheating, cut-and-dry in the clearest black and white that could be expressed, anything past that would have made it real. Would have made it her fault. There was something about getting carried away in the moment, but something else entirely about making a conscious decision to carry it through to its conclusion. It was the justification her brain stuck to.

There was also a white elephant: she doubted Leon, with his stubborn adherence to justice and truth would approve of it. Or her. Doubted very much. With a note of shame, Claire realized that Jamie’s feelings hadn’t factored in at all.

When they arrived she pointed out Chris' house, a small shotgun-style townhome on the outskirts of a decent suburb. She’d managed to score this place by combing through the paper, and even then it was a lucky break for a market like D.C. It was a place Chris could settle in, and maybe the stability would help his recovery.

Leon pulled to a stop, put the car in park. They were both quiet, waiting for the other to speak. Simultaneous, they both laughed, embarrassed.

“I hope your guys are okay,” Claire said, “and you. Go home and rest, okay?”

Leon nodded. “I’ve got a date with a certain mattress, I think.” He paused, again with a thoughtful expression. “What do you think, Friday?”

Claire blinked. "For..."

"You offered me dinner," Leon said, "I intend to collect."

_Collect, you say? I got something you can--_

Claire smiled, heartened. He still wanted to. “Oh! Yeah. Yeah, of course! That sounds great! I’m sure Chris can watch her.”

Committed to stamping out any weirdness or awkwardness before it took root, Claire unbuckled her belt, leaned over the center console, and gave Leon a hug. It wasn’t a new gesture between them — she’d grabbed him in so many surprise embraces that she probably qualified for a Judo blackbelt by now — but it felt new. There was a lingering that translated, too long or too hard or not hard enough. When Claire pulled back, he brushed one of her curls away from her face.

“Okay.” He said, but made no further moves. "Thanks for uh... walking with me, today."

Claire averted her eyes and then gave him a pointed look like she knew what he was up to. That same expression on his face from earlier -- _I know what I'm doing, I'm just enjoying watching you not enjoy it._

"Sure." She said. "I liked our walk too."

They said their goodnights and Claire climbed out of his car, stunned and dreamlike. He waited until she was safely inside to pull off, and she stood in the shadows of the foyer, thinking of nothing and everything all at once.

“Claire,” Chris’ voice, surprised and questioning, from the kitchen where he was looking through the mostly-barren fridge. “There you are. You okay?”

Claire nodded. “Yeah…” she said, and fought back a smile as it tried to emerge on her face. “I think so.”


	32. Earth and Ashes

June 8, 1999  
Washington, D.C.  
7:45 AM

No music in Kevin’s car this morning. Without the bombastic squeals of electric guitars, the shimmering scales of keyboards, the silence might have felt wrong on any other day. Kevin and Carlos were discussing something, Kevin speaking to the backseat over his shoulder with his eyes on the road under a pair of dark aviator sunglasses, Carlos’ forearms leaned over the shoulder rests of the front seats. Their conversation had a strangely muted quality, as if speaking too loudly might have been a violation of decorum.

 _Like how people speak at a funeral_ , a part of Jill’s mind thought, and then released it.

“Can we listen to the news?” Jill asked. “Maybe they’ve got an update.”

“Sure thing,” Kevin said, and turned the radio dial until he found the resonant, businesslike warmth of a radio host’s voice.

_—motional, explosive first day of testimony. Public opinion, however, seems to be split._

A man’s voice—a clipped, brusque northern accent, underpinned by the distant honking of car horns.

“Yeah! Yeah, I do have an opinion about the trial. Look—I been using Umbrella medicine all my life. I got a bad heart. I’ve never even heard of a FBI Commission. Or—what? FBEIEIO. Or whatever it is. What’s that? Who is this Kennedy guy? Why should I care what he says? Why should he get to say who I get my medicine from?” _What’s your opinion on the explosion at the FBC building, immediately following the first day of the trial?_ “Why the **_beep_ **should I care? What’s that got to do with me?”

_It didn’t take long to find opposing opinions, of course._

A woman’s voice, timid and stuttering. “I-I-I just don’t think it’s right. They’ve got… kids up there, going through all this, and… no. No, I don’t think it’s right. I think they should pay for it if it’s true.” _Do you think it’s true?_ “Well, I don’t know. That’s the point of a trial, right?”

 _Did you watch the Umbrella trial yesterday?_ “Most of it.” _Do you think one way or another that you were convinced by the first witness’ testimony?_ “Yeah. Maybe. He seemed honest. Would someone who isn’t honest tell you the stuff he screwed up? No, he’d try to make himself look good. I think he was telling the truth.” _Do you support the dissolution of Umbrella?_ “…I don’t know. That’s a big company. What would it do to the economy, you know?” _So even if Umbrella was guilty… you wouldn’t want them dissolved?_ “…probably not. You know, I don’t know.”

_Umbrella’s spokeswoman, Gabrielle Alonzo, offered these remarks to WLFM-5 when asked for an official statement:_

“It’s just a very sad day for America, Kellyanne. What we’re seeing here is the world’s largest producer of life-saving medicine, from insulin to beta-blockers to pediatric chemotherapy treatments, being threatened on the world’s stage because of outlandish conspiracy theories. We’re confident the truth will be brought to light and this will just be an embarrassing memory by this time next year, and then we can get back to business — our only business — which is saving lives.”

Jill sighed.

“I think I’ve heard enough news,” she said. There was no argument, only the steadying warmth of Carlos’ hand on her shoulder. Kevin pushed the volume knob, and with a click, there was silence once again.

***

Washington D.C.  
Capitol Hill  
10:00AM

Doctor Hamilton laid his hand against a Bible, pledged to tell the truth, and was seated beside Congressman Graham. His morning was nothing like Leon’s; he’d eaten breakfast. Hadn’t been sick. Slightly nervous, perhaps, but the only emotion that reached his face were the sensible creases of thought across his forehead. He drank from the provided bottle of water on the table, and listened while a Congresswoman—Suzi Bradley, her name was, from a district in Michigan—was introduced by the Justice. She was impossible to tell apart from the others, same business suit and understated jewelry, except for the fact that she looked very, very young, her long, straight black hair worn down over one shoulder.

“Good morning. If the witness may please state his name and title?”

George adjusted the microphone before him so it was closer to his face. “My name is George Louis Hamilton. My title is Doctor of Surgery.”

“I see. Do you prefer doctor, then?”

“Either Doctor or Mister Hamilton is fine.”

“Thank you, doctor. And what job did you hold pertaining to the case we’re hearing this morning?”

“I was the Chief of Surgery at Spencer Memorial Hospital. I performed cardiothoracic procedures.”

“Can you explain to the court what you mean by that term?”

“Of course. I performed surgeries within the thoracic cavity—the ribcage. Mostly surgeries on the heart and lungs or the surrounding spaces, though I could also operate on the liver, kidneys, and stomach if necessary.”

“Quite an accomplished man, then. What years were you chief of surgery?”

“Two years, as of December 1998.”

“And you oversaw other surgeons?”

“Correct, when our late Chief Operating Officer, Doctor Nathaniel Bard, was unavailable.”

“So—I’m looking over your record, if you’ll forgive me for saying so bluntly… it says here you were dismissed from your position on September 20th, 1998.”

George nodded. “That’s correct.”

“For gross negligence?”

Even now, the words struck him somewhere in the center of his brain that controlled panic—and maybe shame. “That was the reason given, yes.”

“That’s severe. May the record state that the definition of gross negligence, medically, refers to ‘conduct so reckless or mistaken as to be virtually obvious to a person with no medical training’. Could you please explain the case which lead to your firing?”

“There were multiple cases.”

“How many is ‘multiple’?”

“Over eighty. I don’t remember the exact number.”

A small mumble of concern from the crowd behind. George’s face burned, whether with embarrassment or anger, he wasn’t sure. He never had been sure, not when it came to this.

“So—I would like the record to reflect that upon reviewing Doctor Hamilton’s employment record, which we’ve retrieved from the national licensing database, there were no stated violations against his medical license until… August 29, 1998. Would you like to explain?”

“Raccoon City is average for health problems among the Midwestern belt. High rates of obesity, and comorbidities related to diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. But at the end of August, 1998, and into September we saw… spikes like I’d never seen before in gross, systemic organ failure.”

“Objection,” said Arthur Miller from his seat across the aisle, where he sat spearheading the copse of attorneys, separated from the rest of the crowd. “This is a very heartbreaking story, but it has nothing to do with why Mister Hamilton was fired.”

“Doctor Hamilton,” the Congresswoman corrected, “his license has not yet been revoked.”

“Oh,” the attorney replied, “on a technicality then, I suppose he is still a doctor.”

“Counsel,” the Justice said, warning in his voice, “remember where you are, please. And Doctor Hamilton, please get to the point.”

“Yes, your honor. I’ll try to be quick, but it is a bit of a longer story. Suddenly where per week I may have been treating four or five heart transplants or drilling out blockages, now there were five a night, which became ten, then twenty, twenty five a night—but with no common cause other than hypoxia. Lack of oxygen. After the hospital was threatened with lawsuits by the families citing gross negligence with my procedures as the common cause when all of those patients eventually died, that’s when I was relieved of my position.”

“ _All_ of your patients died?”

George paused. “Yes. These people were breathing, mechanically, but the oxygen wasn’t getting to their organs. Our hospital treated... well, it had to be hundreds of people with the same symptoms in late August, early September. All ages, all backgrounds, no comorbidities that we could see. Just massive amounts of heart and liver failure. Sudden, no explanation. The transplant wait list quadrupled within…” he stopped. His dark eyebrows raised and wrinkled his forehead, as if still surprised by the fact. “Well, weeks. Not even weeks. But I remember, very clearly — they all had what we thought was Raynaud’s phenomenon. Where the arteries and blood vessels constrict too much and result in a very distinct blue-gray discoloration of the fingers and toes in response to cold. But it was the wrong time of year for it, and increased bloodflow didn’t improve the condition. Later they would present with cyanotic organs — blue, from lack of oxygen, just like the fingers — mostly the heart and the liver. But we eventually realized something else had to be causing systemic failure. Some underlying comorbidity or chemical agent. No disease kills people that quickly and that efficiently across all backgrounds and ages without there being some sort of outside cause. But by then we’d buried all of those patients we’d operated on.”

He stopped. Shook his head, as if reminding himself to stay on task.

“We became overwhelmed and attempted to send them away to other hospitals, but these patients would die before we even got them loaded into a helicopter. Literally strangle to death while their lungs were still mechanically expanding and drawing in air. Their bodies dying from the fingers and toes inward. The same patients, even after receiving donor organs, would reappear days later with the same syndrome. Completely healthy donor organs from young people, sometimes teenagers with no health issues, installed and then failing three, four days later. It didn’t apply to a certain race, or socioeconomic class. I saw grandmothers, small children, babies, college students. All with the same syndrome.”

"And this syndrome you speak of--have you seen it anywhere else since?"

"It's the exact same symptoms as victims of the T-virus infection I saw while attempting to escape Raccoon City, yes."

"Objection," Miller said again, "Doctor Hamilton is an accomplished surgeon, but he is not an expert in immunology or the T-virus pathogen simply because he operated on victims of it."

Jill glared in his direction so hard her head started to hurt.

"But we _do_ have testimony from an expert who is unfortunately no longer with us," said Congressman Graham, silent until now, "that agrees with Doctor Hamilton's accounts."

"...sustained," the Justice sighed, "I understand the prosecution has suffered a tragic loss with the untimely death of Doctor Behara, however we can't start substituting witnesses for one another without considering their credentials. We'll review the medical evidence from Doctor Behara's files at recess, but for now, please rephrase, Congresswoman."

The young Congresswoman also leveled a glare at the attorney for a second longer than she had to, and then turned back to Doctor Hamilton. “And they threatened your license.”

“They did.”

“That sounds like a very terrible thing to live through.”

“It was a nightmare. For everyone involved—the patients, the families, the medical staff. As a doctor you try to help. To save people, but when you do everything thats been working before and they continue to die under your hands… I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. That feeling of helplessness. The sheer human cost was overwhelming.”

“We’ve pulled the list from the United Network of Organ Sharing, which is the centralized repository of information for organ transplant statistics, and the requests from Raccoon City in particular and surrounding counties did in fact spike by over 765% from July to September of 1998. So there was suddenly an overwhelming demand for organs where there were none before. Did you have any botched, failed surgeries before?”

To that, George sat straighter. “I can say very confidently that I have not. Not all surgeries end well, but none of mine ended poorly because of negligence or gross human error.”

“So this couldn’t have been simple human error? How long were your shifts at this hospital?”

“At its worst, I lived there. I would work the surgical theater for 16 hours—as long as I was allowed to, legally—and then do paperwork, and spend the rest sleeping in my office.”

“You were also going through a divorce at this time. This couldn’t have impacted your work? Cumulatively?”

“It couldn’t have. The divorce came after the firing. My late ex-wife served me with papers the day after my suspension came through.”

The Congresswoman’s face turned slightly sympathetic, and she shook her head in disbelief. “Something I don’t understand—if the situation was so severe. Why didn’t you reach out to the government for help?”

“We did. We petitioned our Chief of Staff, Doctor Nathaniel Bard, to reach out to the CDC on our behalf.”

“And was anything done?”

A long pause. “No. Not that I was made aware of.”

“No additional staff?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Supplies?”

“We were told that we were running a business, not a charity, so we had to make do with what we had. I personally had to send one of my nurses three hours away to Louisville, Kentucky to buy out the entire stock of a Gould’s Discount Medical for their PPE out of my own pocket so I could continue to work. Gowns, gloves, face coverings. We were using so many supplies every single day that it ran out, but… no, no additional supplies were sent.”

“So I’m understanding your account correctly, Doctor Hamilton: you, Chief of Surgery, were fired, while people were dying of a mysterious widespread disease which required a cardiothoracic surgeon to treat, and regular measures were not improving the survivability of.”

“That’s correct.”

“The requests for transplant organs jumped almost 1000% in just over two months.”

“Yes.”

“You had to buy personal protective equipment to treat these people out of your own pocket.”

George nodded. “That’s correct.”

“And you tried to lobby your hospital’s Chief Officer to contact the CDC, but he declined.”

“As far as I know, nothing was done. No.”

“And they pointed at you, a single surgeon, as the reason for the deaths?”

“Objection,” Miller said again, exasperated, “Doctor Hamilton had almost a hundred surgeries in a single month where the patient had died. It’s not beyond the scope of reason they’d point to him for those people dying, if he’s who actually operated on them when they were still alive.”

“We’re getting to that, thank you Counsel,” the Congresswoman said, “but I do wonder why, if his negligence is the reason, why they allowed him to operate on so many people before suspending him?”

“…continue,” the Justice said, grudging.

“I was the common denominator, as I was told.” George said.

“And did Doctor Bard relieve you before or after the appeal to the CDC?”

“It would have been after.”

“Let the record show that Doctor Hamilton had performed over seventy procedures over a course of almost two months that ended in these failures. His dismissal was only suggested by the Chief Operating Officer after the petition to the CDC, which was requested when?”

“September 15, madam Congresswoman.”

“Quite interesting timing, considering internal documentation also suggests September 15 was the day where Umbrella sent out recruitment calls to its contractor forces which were to be sent into Raccoon City as ‘riot patrol’.”

Something pulled at the corner of Jill’s eye, and she turned. On the far side of the room, three of the Umbrella attorneys had huddled together, speaking in guarded whispers.

“Objection,” spoke Arthur Miller from his seat across the aisle one last time in his smooth, high-pitched voice, “conjecture. Raccoon City is also the home of Umbrella’s very expensive pharmaceutical operations, and the city had yet to contain the riots over the mandated lockdown. Umbrella is within its rights to protect its product. The timing is coincidental at best.”

“…I’ll allow it,” the Justice said, “rephrase, Congresswoman.”

The Congresswoman’s mouth was open to retort, but Doctor Hamilton spoke first.

“Was.”

She looked to him and Doctor Hamilton faltered, for a just a second, with the air of a man who was aware he was committing a grave transgression, but now that the action was done, had committed to it.

“Raccoon City was the home of Umbrella’s operations.” He said. “It’s gone now.”

***

Washington D.C.  
Capitol Hill  
5:05PM

“So,” Carlos’ voice broke into Jill’s head, uncoupled the runaway train of her thoughts. “We still on to watch the fight tonight?”

Jill had been quiet, of course, thinking about something serious. This was their way, as sure as the sun set and the moon took its place in turn: her brain would be barreling down one track, ignoring the world around it and focusing on her destination ten stops ahead, while his pollinator’s mind landed on multiple bright, colorful, interesting things before fluttering back towards her. When they had first become close, it was a habit she’d mistaken for inattention, but was quickly disproven as his own way of gently redirecting her when her thoughts got too intense, too deep in the wrong direction. _Hey Supercop, Earth to Supercop, you read? Stop thinking about heavy shit for a sec, what'd you think about this?_

“Fight…” She blinked, searched Carlos' face for a moment while her brain switched tracks. He watched her with quiet amusement. “That _is_ tonight, isn’t it?”

“ _There_ she is,” Carlos laughed, “and yeah, it’s tonight. After today, watching Gracie beat some wholesale ass is just what the doctor ordered, I think. What you think, pizza or wings?”

There was a brief moment where Jill’s logical mind wondered exactly why he’d ask about something like that right now, four or five hours before any sort of event. But her stomach had other ideas, and began to protest. She thought she might be able to drink an entire gallon of pizza sauce on the spot, now that the thought was put into her head. “I think I’d slap someone for some pizza right now.” He opened his mouth to speak and she cut him off, “With extra green peppers.”

Carlos nodded. “We can do that.”

“Oh! And mushrooms?”

“’Course.”

Jill wandered towards him, against him, her arms winding around the closest of his. “Oh, and… and pineapple. EXTRA pineapple.”

“Okay,” Carlos laughed again, “now you’re pushing it.”

Five o'clock was quitting time for just about everybody in this place, and the human snarl of foot traffic was somehow worse than the morning; everyone trying to leave at the same time, dodging around the same journalists, descending the same steps. As if melting out from the crowd of people, a man appeared, just another dark pleated suit in a sea of expensive seams and silken ties, glinting watches and servile, bladelike smiles. As he approached, Carlos moved ahead of Jill by half a step to block the man’s path towards her. A hobbled defensive line ready to smash one of his heavy shoulders against anyone who made the mistake of getting too close, despite his injuries, despite his weariness. The foot traffic parted around them like water parting around a rock in a stream.

“Excuse us,” Carlos said. Jill had known quite a few large, strong men in her life. Carlos was unique among them for one reason: he didn’t threaten, didn’t yell, didn’t curse. If he had been any of the others, she would have already been chasing him, pulling him back by his arm. He actually seemed averse to random violence, more so than she sometimes, but sometimes—like now—he spoke in a tone when he sensed danger that cleaved down the border between nicety and challenge, separated them into two pieces that one chose to receive as the warning it was, or politeness that didn’t seek to cause problems where problems weren’t already brewing. If their guest sensed that simmering, he took no heed.

“Of course,” the man said, and stopped directly in Carlos’ rook-straight path, unafraid. “I do however need to speak with you, for just a moment. I won’t take much of your time.”

Carlos stopped. He gestured to Jill with a backwards jab of his thumb. “Look, buddy, my lady here — she’s had a long day. Alright? You can ask whatever you’re gonna ask her tomorrow. Just move.”

“Actually,” the man reached into his expensive leather file folder, and presented Carlos with a sheet of paper that rattled with self-importance as it was proffered. “While I’m sure that’s true, I need to speak with you, Mister Oliveira. You’ve been formally issued a cease and desist letter on behalf of my client, Umbrella Incorporated.”

Jill could almost hear the needle scratch across the spinning record of Carlos’ brain. Carlos took the paper in a slow, stunned way, and looked down at it. Jill stopped beside him, peered around the bulk of his shoulder to look at the letter.

“A cease and desist for what?” She asked.

“As a standard measure of information security, Mister Oliveira signed a nondisclosure agreement upon employment with Umbrella Incorporated. His presence at this trial presents a clear violation of that agreement, as he appears to be in close contact with a member of the prosecution’s case. This represents a conflict of interest.”

Jill stared at the man while Carlos quietly read the letter, heavy lashes moving in flickers and darts as he scanned the words on the page. “You can’t control who he talks to in his personal life. That’s bullshit.”

“No,” the man said, “but I can enforce a prior employee not putting themselves in a position to reveal proprietary trade secrets that were agreed upon as confidential. Or rather, the law can.”

Jill thought about this. She turned to Carlos, extended an open hand, fingers gently poised to receive the paper. “Can I see that?”

There are a few small victories in life. The first day of your favorite season after a bleak winter or a punishing summer. A chocolate chip cookie or a five second orgasm. The look on the attorney’s face was one of these small victories, stunned and sagged and blinking while Jill tore the sheet into strips, then jagged square pieces. She tossed the handful of paper back in his direction, a confetti-shower of tastefully weighted off-white garbage. “That’s what I think of your fucking NDA, and the company that made it.”

The man stood straight and still, his face impassive. “That was a legally binding document.”

“Whoops,” Jill said, and pulled Carlos along by his free hand. “Come on.”

“Put it on my tab.” Carlos said, with an unmistakable puff of shrugging amusement. They pushed past the man, moving to melt into the flowing routes of foot traffic, when he spoke again after them.

“You can’t just ignore the law. What you do has consequences. You signed an agreement, Mr. Oliveira.”

Jill stopped. It took Carlos, who had long ago tuned out the man’s insults, losing contact with her hand to turn around — by that time, Jill had already eaten the space between she and the attorney with taps of her heeled shoes.

“You know what? You’re right.” She said. “What you do _does_ have consequences. That’s why we’re here. These are _your_ consequences. I suggest you find a new job, because yours is about to be toast. I hear Taco Bell is hiring.”

Carlos’ hand closed in a gentle loop around the widest part of Jill’s upper arm. When she turned towards it, he was leaned close, all width and warmth and low, understanding tones. His face was so close the coarse loops of his curls brushed and tickled against her temple. “Not that I wouldn’t pay to hear you rip this guy’s ass all day long… but…” he lifted his eyes in an indicative glance to a half-moon of interested television cameras that had moved closer to catch the altercation. Beaming lights and boom microphones bent closer on their mechanical arms, hovering like the metal legs of a massive insect.

“No…” Jill said, distantly. She shook her head, and looked Carlos in his eyes — normally the brown of rich soil but now cast golden in the direct light that moved in front of them. “No. I’ve got this.”

Carlos’ face settled into an expression of recognition, and he frowned, released her without comment and stood back. Jill turned back to the attorney.

“Maybe you’d like to tell _them_ about what you just served a Raccoon City survivor,” Jill said in a clear, loud voice, pointing at the cameras. “So _they_ can hear you.”

“Happily. Mister Oliveira was a contractor with Umbrella incorporated. He as such signed a non-disclosure agreement based on his previous employment,” the attorney said, “his presence at this trial is a clear violation of that agreement. We’re simply asking that he abide by the agreement he signed.”

“Exactly,” Jill said, “agreements and contracts and nooses made of paperwork and they all end in silence. Why? If your company is innocent, what are you hiding that you don’t want him to tell?”

“I’m not the one who signed an NDA, Miss Valentine,” the attorney retorted, “he is. If he has questions about—”

“Does that mean Umbrella anticipated the trial?!” One of the reporters asked, crowding closer.

“I have no comment,” the attorney said, “I was only here to serve paperwork, not speak on behalf of Umbrella to the press.”

“Why not?” Jill asked again. “Now that people are listening, you suddenly have nothing to say?”

Jill saw Carlos flinch; discomfort. She gestured to him to stay where he was.

“And yes, he was an employee of Umbrella,” Jill said, “and Mister Oliveira is also the only reason I survived the incident in Raccoon City. He is a good person. A _selfless_ person. And Umbrella sent him into a warzone with no information on what he’d find there — sent there to die with the rest of his squad as a part of a cover up attempt. You don’t get to destroy, and hurt, and conceal, and lie, and then demand silence. Not from Mr. Oliveira, not from me, not from any of us.”

A chorus of overlapping questions. Jill shook her head.

“I’ve got nothing else to say.” She indicated the paper on the floor to the attorney as she passed. “You dropped something.”

Jill stalked away, vaguely aware she was being followed. She blew out a tight chest full of air; her hands started to shake once the adrenaline left her, draining back out of her body like receding flood water. Her heart fluttered in her chest. Carlos waited until they were outside and pulled her away from the doors, pressed a kiss against the side of her head. He spoke, muffled, into her hair.

“I ever tell you how hot it is when you get all pitbull on a motherfucker?” He said.

Jill laughed, sudden and loud, and tried to pull away from him; like a finger trap, he just squeezed tighter.

“No no, don’t move. Everyone’s gonna see my boner.”

“You’re welcome. Come on, our cab is waiting.”

Jill took Carlos' crutch and slid against his side. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and leaned his weight on her, hopping down the steps in time.

“How the table turns,” Jill said. “You know, I think I’m better at the knight in shining armor thing than you are.”

Carlos looked offended. “Pff! C’mon. I am the _king_ of smooth. You got shit on my game.”

“The 'tall drink of water' game? Really?”

“Hey. Worked, didn’t it?”

“I’m not tall. For one. And two, I don’t even remember half the shit you said.”

“Look, all I’m saying is even if you don’t remember, I do.”

“Really.”

“Sure. You were all like _ooooohhh Carlos, how’d you get so manly and tough? Come here and let me rub my boobs on your muscles!_ I remember.”

“I’m going to _trip you down these steps_.”

“So you can fall for me a second time?”

“Oh my fucking _God_.”

Jill pantomimed checking him with her hip and Carlos juked away, just in time to accidentally catch the downward motion of a passerby, who slammed into him with his shoulder. Carlos stumbled, and out of habit planted his bad foot. White plaster clattered a loud warning against the stone of the step. Carlos waited for the shockwave of pain, for the encompassing bark of agony that would indicate he’d landed all of his two-hundred and thirty pounds on a broken limb, propped only by paper and ceramic and metal that bolted his shattered bones back together.

“ _Oh, shit_ ,” Jill cursed, panicked, “are you okay?”

Carlos lifted his bad leg twice and stomped it against the ground.

“What are you doing?!” Jill winced. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“It… it doesn’t hurt,” he said, then stood on it. “What the fuck…?” He asked nobody in particular.

Jill tilted her head. “No pain at all sounds bad… we should to get you to a hospital, just so they can check.”

“Ah, come on. I don’t think…”

“No. Don’t start.” Jill said. “We’re going.”

***

George Washington University Hospital  
Washington, D.C.  
8:15pm

Waits at emergency rooms were never quick things. In New York City, a trip for anything other than a brain aneurysm or a heart attack meant Don’t Make Any Fucking Plans: once as a bored kid, Carlos and one of his similarly bored cousins had the bright idea to jump across a concrete ravine. He landed smack on his elbow and got himself into a cast for the better part of four months. That trip had taken almost 12 hours from check-in to check-out.

D.C. was similar: Carlos and Jill sat for an hour and a half in the waiting room after he was checked in, surrounded by moaning, hurt people, some who were throwing up into long, tubular blue plastic bags. They half-watched silent reruns of Friends on a single TV fixed in the corner between a wall and the ceiling — **“ASK HOSPITAL STAFF TO CHANGE STATION, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH TELEVISION”** read a small, laminated sign hung over its control panel just below the glass screen. Below that, a small sign with a clip art picture of a cell phone with a Ghostbusters No! around it decreed **“PLEASE TURN OFF ALL CELLULAR DEVICES”**. Shit. Carlos retrieved his, turned it off, then shoved it back in his pocket.

“Honestly don’t think it’s this serious…” Carlos said. “It feels fine.”

“Mm-mm,” Jill denied him, shaking her head, her eyes closed. “Circulation is serious when you have a cast. Do you want to lose your leg?”

“That mean I get one of those cool robot legs? Then absolutely.”

Jill opened her eyes just to glare at him, unsuccessfully fought a grudging smile. She settled against Carlos’ collarbone at an angle, over the hard armrest between their chairs. “We’re staying until you get seen.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, sarcastic, and put an arm around her shoulder. Beside him, the man with the barf bag threw up again.

Some time after Ross and Rachel had their fifth argument of the night and Carlos wondered for the tenth time exactly what people thought was so fucking funny about this show, they called his name and he was moved to a semi-private room to wait. He was separated from two other patients by lavender-and-blue curtains on either side of the bed, hung from oval runners on the ceiling. Carlos sat on a bed dressed with white linens so stiff and thin they crinkled and scraped when he moved. There were no sounds from either side except for a person’s ringtone — some shitty version of a piano tune that rang once about every two minutes.

A young girl wearing scrubs with pictures of Snoopy in different poses of jubilation and dance printed all over them appeared minutes later with a mobile machine that looked like a carpet cleaner with a mechanical arm sticking out of its top. She pushed it to his bedside.

“I’m here to take some pictures of your leg,” she said, “put it up here on the bed and stay still as possible, okay?” Carlos did. She took a few photos of his cast, and was gone as soon as she came.

She was the last person Carlos saw other than Jill for what seemed like hours. From where Carlos was sitting, he couldn’t see the wall clock. Out of habit he reached for his phone, and then remembered the rule from the placard outside.

“Great,” he mumbled, and settled in. He could feel his foot, could feel his leg; as time wore on he doubted very much this was any kind of circulation issue, a false flag thrown by the handfuls of ibuprofen he’d been dry-swallowing as an automatic reaction to every minor headache or muscle strain since his time in the military. He considered pleading his case to Jill again, but she was a nut that was impossible to crack once she’d gotten an idea into her head. Unless you had a damn good reason to tell her she was wrong, she wasn’t wrong, and what she said was going to happen, happened. It was better not to pick that fight unless you were absolutely sure you could win it. The shitty electric piano-song rang again, and Carlos put his face in his hands.

“Think I’m gonna hear that song in my fuckin’ nightmares,” he grumbled.

“That’s sad. It’s a good song.” Jill said, and then laughed, quietly. “I used to play it all the time at recitals. Talk about a blast from the past.”

“Piano recitals?”

Jill nodded. “Would you believe it?”

Carlos cocked his head. “You know… yeah. I would. You got the dainty fingers.”

“Do I?”

“Oh yeah. You play seriously?”

“Just concerts and things like that as a teenager. Gave it up when my Dad realized he couldn’t make me go to lessons anymore.”

Carlos considered this. “You should play for me sometime.”

“I’ll just embarrass myself. I think I’ve forgotten everything about it unless you want me to play Chopsticks or Greensleeves.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about it, so I don’t know any better.” Carlos was undeterred in his cheerful way, found a way around her complaint that still sounded optimistic and complimentary. Jill had no idea how he did it so easily. “Fact you think I know what those are is cute, by the way.”

“What about you?”

“Just… y’know, meathead stuff. Boxing, weightlifting. Running, sometimes. Not as fast as I used to be. When I was a kid, man, I could motor. These days I’m too heavy, I think.”

“Oh, come on.”

Carlos made a noise of dismissal. “Come on yourself, you see this?” He put his hands against his abdomen, and shook the nothing he found there for comedic effect. “Look, a year ago if I’d just randomly packed on twenty pounds, I’d hear no end of shit from basically everyone. I can hear what T would fucking say.”

It was intended as a joke but it hit differently, landed just short of its mark, exposed something deeper than intended.

“You miss them.” Jill said, gently.

After a moment of thoughtful silence, Carlos nodded. “Yeah. Guess I do. There’s a lot of…” he sighed, scrubbed a hand through the wild, dark riot of his hair. “Things are so different now. Guess it’s still hard to believe. You know?”

“We could talk about them,” Jill said, “that’s a way of keeping them alive. If just for a little while.”

“We don’t gotta. I’m good.”

“I know we don’t have to—but I want to.”

“You wanna hear about ‘em?”

Jill climbed to her feet, pushed herself out of the chair by the armrests. She sat beside him on the bed. Her upper arm grazed his. “Yeah. I do.”

Carlos was quiet. Tried to think of where to start. “I knew Tyrell the best,” The name felt like a lie, unnatural and stiff from disuse. “We were in the Corps together, back in the day. He’s how I got into the UBCS. We both got out at the same time but lost touch for about a year, but he found me at—at my next job. Total coincidence.”

“What was your next job?” Jill tilted her head.

“Nah, not important.”

“Now I’m really curious, because you don’t want to tell me.”

Carlos looked aside at her, imploring her to drop it. He relented, eventually, with a sound of disdain. Carlos rocked forward and then back as if wrestling with a heavy thought that weighed his head forward. Pressed his lips together and then looked aside to her. “Bouncing,” he said.

“Like at a night club?”

“…’nother kind of club, but yeah.”

Jill laughed, incredulous. “You were a bouncer at a strip club?”

Carlos shrugged. “I needed money, and they needed a meathead to dump rich trust fund kids on their asses outside. It was a good arrangement. Anyway—that’s where T found me. He came in with his boys one night to wind down from a spin around the globe somewhere, and I guess I made a good impression.” He paused. “You didn’t get to really talk to T, did you?”

“A little. After you left.” Jill swung her legs. His feet touched the floor but hers didn’t, shy by a good few inches. “He was a good guy.”

“Pretended he an asshole… but you kinda had to in our job or you’d get eaten alive. But he was a good guy.” Carlos blinked quickly, dark heavy lashes fluttering, and looked down. “Had three kids, you know? And a wife, back in Atlanta.”

Something twisted deep in Jill’s chest. “Oh, God.”

Carlos nodded, slowly; not agreement but resignation. “I think about him a lot. ‘Specially these days.” A smile fought through his expression. “You know — he was so funny. He fucking loved outer space. Like stars and planets and shit, right? He actually named one of his daughters after a moon or… or a constellation or something. Miranda.” Carlos paused, then spoke faster, as if the thoughts were sparking other memories that had been forgotten. “Don’t know how many times he dragged me out of our damn tent to go look at something in the sky while we were overseas. I’m all sandblasted and tired and he’s kickin’ my ribs like” Carlos changed his voice, pitched it huskier in imitation, a bit higher than his own, “Just come on, numbnuts, this happens once every ten years and there’s no lights, come out here. And it would always be this… tiny little… bwoop! in the sky. Like nothing. But he was so excited about it.”

“You know… I can totally see Tyrell being just that kind of nerd. With a telescope…”

Carlos nodded, a warm, nostalgic smile pulling up one corner of his mouth. “Man. Haven’t thought about that in forever.”

Just then, a female voice, calm and formal over a loudspeaker. _“Attention hospital staff, Code External Triage, front lobby. Code External triage, front lobby.”_ They both titled curious faces to the source of the voice, mounted somewhere near the ceiling.

“There’s something I always wondered,” Jill said. “You did eight years as a Marine—why not become a cop?” Over his laughter, she insisted, “No, I’m serious. Why Umbrella? I’ve seen you fight. There’s so many other things you could have done.”

Carlos’ gaze lingered against the floor for a quiet moment, and then he turned to her. “When I got out. You know what I did for work?”

“You just told me. You were a bouncer.”

“That was later—truth is, I didn’t do anything. There were no jobs. I mean, sure, you could find a gig as a line cook in some shitty spot before the NYHD grabbed ‘em, or bounce at a bar, but after you tipped the girls out and buy food for the week or put some cash away for rent, sometimes I’d have to ask my mom for money just to get my MetroCard for the next month. When I went into the Corps I had a good job, a place to stay, food. And then I got out and there was nothing. They even turned me down for unemployment and food stamps. I made too much. Can you believe that shit? I had Citizenship and all, but as soon as Uncle Sam was in my rear view I was just another brown dude out of millions in a city that didn’t give a shit about me. Thanks for your service, food pantry’s around the corner. After that, when you get hungry enough and the eviction papers are on the door, Umbrella starts to look like a way out.”

“Why didn’t you move somewhere else?”

“Costs money. After a while you learn to stop thinking about where the boat’s sailing and focus on trying to bail the water out.” He paused. “Why don’t you tell me about your guys?”

“My guys?” Jill said, confused.

“STARS. Lot got made of how you were… you know. Last member of STARS, that kind of thing. Means there were a few more we never got to meet.” He nudged her with his shoulder, gently. “Tell me about ‘em.”

“Well… you met Chris. And Barry. And there’s Rebecca. The girl with the short hair, that was with me in the front row.”

“The skinny one? Her? Naw.”

“Oh yeah. She got one hit of field work and left, though.”

Carlos laughed. “Can’t say I blame her if that was her first assignment. That’s rough.”

“But… oh man. There were these two guys, Brad and Kenneth. Kevin can vouch for this—they would fuck with Barry constantly. Barry would…” Jill’s face broke into a beaming smile, and she laughed in a way that made her words come out as half-formed things, hard to hear. “Barry would come in from a weekend off and his whole desk would be just wrapped in tin foil. He’d yell for Brad because he already knew who did it and he would sit there just stewing with this—this look on his face while he unwrapped these boxes full of bullets. They were always goofing off.”

“Man. That’s dedication.” For an inexplicable moment, Carlos remembered the color _yellow_ —bright canary yellow like a dandelion that hadn’t yet lost its vitality to wisps of dead white seeds to be blown away on the wind. Realization sunk against the deepest part of Carlos’ brain like a cold, heavy stone, and he remembered yellow, alright—yellow slicked with rain and blood and gouts of pus, jacketing peeling gray skin like a coat of bright paint over the rotten wooden siding of a condemned house. A structure so rotten it had to be destroyed. “You said his name was… Brad?”

Jill nodded. “Brad Vickers.” The laughs stopped, gradually. “Only one who kept in contact with me after…” she gestured with a pale, slender hand, and somehow encompassed the helpless enormity of the situation. “Everything.”

Carlos fought to keep his face straight, keep a strangle of guilt like an invasive vine away from his voice box. “Sounds like a good dude.”

Jill nodded. Her expression crumbled, just a little, but she caught it quickly and was composed again. “They all were. I miss them.”

A series of high-pitched squeaks sounded down the hall, like a basketball team pounding down the hardwood lanes of a court. Carlos squinted. After followed a doctor, an older man with graying hair and and the lean, bony build the health-conscious took after a certain age. A few moments later, those same nurses ran back the way they came, bent over a gurney, pushing it as the doctor barked orders for some kind of medicine, some kind of oxygen. The figure on the gurney was a blur of black and red and gray and white. The blackened smell of charred meat wafted in threads through the cold air, dissipated as it met the stiff, antiseptic smell of the room. A trail of blood pattered after the stretcher, along the hallway floor, a trail of dark splashes like the footsteps of something invisible and malicious.

“Jesus,” Carlos said. As if to underline his horror, another gurney clattered by the door. Its wheels rattled and spun like a oversized shopping cart. On it laid a large man with a clear, shining oxygen mask affixed over his face, his expanse of skin mottled a sick shade of gray-purple. Yells in medical jargon, demands for things Carlos didn’t understand — maybe drugs — rang up and down the hallway. Another team of nurses ran past the door. One slipped on the errant puddle of dark fluid, caught herself against his doorway, and was off again. Someone beyond the curtain to Carlos’ left mumbled in tones of subdued concern, whether it was for the rush of activity outside or for whatever was happening past the rough textiles that boxed them into this small part of the room, he wasn’t sure.

A woman entered the room, thin-limbed and slender, stress lines carved into her pale, inquisitive face. Her scrubs, an unassuming shade of teal-green, were splashed and sponged with rusty gashes and blooms of blood. She tossed a clipboard onto the table by the door, haphazard; it clattered and almost tipped onto the floor. She ducked, retrieved a thin, scratchy-looking mustard-yellow gown from a low drawer, tied it over her scrubs without wasting a single movement. The gown was to keep anybody from touching the blood, Carlos assumed.

“Sorry for the wait,” she said, her cadence quick and businesslike. She crossed the room and took one of Carlos’ thick wrists, tilted it to read the information on the white paper of his bracelet. She didn’t look at him. He was a job to be done and pushed out between whatever was going on down the hall, whatever had splashed her with the internal cogs and gears of someone who probably didn’t make it. “Name and date of birth?”

Carlos supplied them. Satisfied, she released his arm. “Is it okay if we discuss medical information in front of your guest, sir?”

“No mysteries here,” Carlos said. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than she was speaking again, moving again.

“Alright. I’ve got your x-rays. If you look…” she hooked four thin sheets of black plastic to the metal upper barrier of a small projector screen with practiced speed. They clicked into place and became ghostly images of a single disembodied limb, luminous and glowing like toxic waste against the glossy black. “Here’s your bone. Here are the plates. This is muscle tissue right here. The bone looks like its thickened in all the right places, the plates still look like they’re aligned. There’s no compartment syndrome, no swelling, or any residual fractures, so the lack of pain you feel is probably just your leg healing up normally. So if you’re ready, we can take it off and have you out of here.”

Carlos stared at her. All that escaped him was a laugh: small, disbelieving. “What?”

“Are you sure that’s him?” Jill asked, glancing back and forth between Carlos and the doctor, who stared at them with a breed of impatient confusion.

“We can take your cast off,” the doctor repeated, already wielding a small tool looked like a studfinder you’d use to find places to mount something in a wall. She moved toward him. “He’s got to put his leg on the bed, ma’am, so if you could just scoot over for me for a second.”

“Look doc, I ain’t trying to be difficult, but… I took three AR rounds through my bone just two weeks ago,” Carlos repeated, “You sure you got the right room?”

The doctor looked at him then down to the clipboard she’d tossed onto the table as she entered. “Unless you’ve traded wristbands with someone else since you’ve been here, you’re my guy. Leg up, please.”

Jill hopped off of the bed but hung near in a way that looked either like worry or protective instinct, like a woman ready to dart out and catch him or maybe cock a fist and let it fly against the side of the doctor’s head if something popped off, despite their size disparity. Her brain was always unaware of how small she actually was.

“Try to stay still.” The doctor said. “This’ll be quick.” She pressed a button on the side and the blade whirred, spinning like a tiny fan. She touched it to the cast and chunks of white plaster spit into a cloud of dust, a mechanical convulsion as the plaster protested against the cuts, vertical down either side of Carlos' leg. The cast cracked open like a sarcophagus, and the doctor carefully lifted its top half. Carlos, too, expected to reveal something ugly, long dead and dessicated. His shin, pillow-lined from pressure and dusted with dark hair, wore three ragged, puffed scars — one straight bullet hole punched through the meat of his thick calf muscle from the front, and two at haphazard angles down the slender taper towards his ankle. It looked more like a wolverine had gotten to his leg rather than a gun, an outward bend in the bone so shallow it was only noticeable because of familiarity rather than severity. The lack of grotesque injury, the lack of blood, was somehow worse than what Carlos was expecting; bullet holes and gore would have confirmed what he knew about the world, about his own body, about the way things were _supposed_ to work. Now everything seemed in question, his bearings lost to an insidious slip of the mind that brought him close to the brink of panic.

If the doctor noticed anything awry, she didn’t say as much. Carlos flexed his foot.

“Can you stand?” She asked.

Jill extended her hands like a dance partner. Carlos took them and stood, unsure.

The doctor asked Carlos to walk. He hesitated to put weight on his injured leg, sure it would snap and grind and cut through the skin once he’d put his full weight upon it. No pain, no blood, no horror show bones stabbing through skin like a ragged javelin, but a shortening, like when you slept on your neck wrong; the muscle on the back of his leg refused to elongate as it had before, stubborn and thick like rubber. His walk was more of a limp, a subtle hobble to accommodate.

“Looks good to me,” the doctor said, peering around his shoulder to look at the back of his leg, “but it does look like your tendons took some damage. You may need to work on stretching them out more, but you should be fine. Can you stand on it?”

Carlos did. Jumped once and caught himself on it, just to be sure. He could feel the force of Jill’s sympathetic wince from his side.

“You sure this is okay?” He asked. “I swear I only got this cast a few weeks back — I mean — shouldn’t it take longer than that? I don’t wanna fuck my leg up if—”

“Well,” the doctor said with a shrug in her voice, and handed him a bright pink shower shoe, “either you’re a Superman or we’re missing some weeks somewhere. Either way, your leg is perfectly fine. There’s probably going to be some residual swelling. Just ice it down, ten minutes at a time.”

The voice on the loudspeaker sounded again. _“Rapid response team, room 234, Code Blue. Rapid response team, room 234, Code Blue. Paging Rapid response team, room 234, Code Blue.”_

“I have to go,” the doctor said, weaving around where Jill stood, and was already halfway out the door when she called, “come back if you have any tingling, any pain in the bone, any swelling that ice doesn’t resolve, okay?”

“Well — looks like I don’t get that robot leg after all, huh?” Carlos asked, looking at the rogue limb. He turned it this way and that as if some sort of computer chip or zipper or seam would present itself and answer his questions.

Jill ignored him. “Is it possible maybe… it hit the muscle, not the bone? Maybe the doctors got it wrong. Something lost in translation?”

Jill could tell by Carlos' breathing he was gearing up to say something, the way it hitched in his chest, as if coalescing around words as they were formed and then denied and then formed again. “Not really sure what to think about it yet, myself. Other than pink isn’t my color.”

She laughed, despite herself. “Can you just be serious, please?”

“I am serious. Think I’m a green kind of guy. Or white. I look pretty good in white, too.”

They left, clasped at the hands, winding around corners and dodging the shopping-cart bang of gurney wheels as the stretchers flew down the hallway under the hands of nurses, Carlos in one heavy black boot and one bubblegum pink flip-flop. Carlos' leg was stiffer than he was used to. The foot wouldn’t roll like it did in a normal step, the tendons on the back of his leg stubbornly refusing to stretch all the way at first. As he used it, warmed it up, it became easier, though the hitch persisted. They neared the doorway. No medical staff was present, all having abandoned their posts. Outside at the cab stop, Jill turned to a woman who stood nearby, and asked: “Is something big going on?”

The woman shook her head in a sort of pitying sympathy as she watched the ambulances with their screaming sirens unload more people. The stretchers rumbled and clattered against the pavement, hustled through the lobby now in twos and threes. The woman’s eyes reflected an unmistakable relief as they followed the track of a young woman on one of the beds, affixed with an oxygen mask, missing her arm below the elbow. The sheet under the patient’s raw, ragged stump was stained a bright, vital red, creased and wet under the bright clinical lights of the lobby overhang.

“Big apartment fire.” The woman at the stop said. “Downtown — arson, they’re saying. Awful.”

The moment Carlos’ phone was switched on, it rang, blaring its tone into the night air. He and Jill shared a cautious glance, and then he answered.

“Hello?”

A pause. A breath of relief on the other line, and then Kennedy’s serious voice. “Please tell me Jill is with you.”


	33. Creep

Barre, Vermont  
June 9, 1999  
1:40pm

Once there was a man named Murphy. Real nasty son of a bitch. Anyway, Murphy had ratified exactly one law in his miserable life, and that law was: Whatever Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong.

Daniel was very familiar with Murphy, especially since the first day he’d begun working at Summer Forest Townhomes, an umbrella company that owned four different properties within a ten-mile radius.

It was a real sucker punch of a day, sunny and hot, the fragrance of blooming tree-branch flowers overpowered by a sudden, choking wall of baking cement and the meaty smell of human sweat. Humidity coiled off the blacktop like a stink; houses and trees danced in real-time distortion past Daniel’s field of vision, pools of phantom liquid on the tarmac dissipating as his car approached. Daniel took off his ball cap by the bill, wiped the slick off his brow with the back of his arm, then affixed the hat back over his head. It didn’t do much; the sweatband inside the hat was already warm and soaked. No surprise. Today was hot, hard work. Daniel was en route to put in work on his fourth AC unit of the day. As luck would have it, during the first real heatwave in the great state of Vermont, every single Godforsaken AC unit in the westernmost—and largest—complex had decided to unilaterally shit themselves. Some sort of blockage in the single vent duct (which had turned out to be a week-dead raccoon carcass; a real treat to clear out, now dug in with undulating pits and trails of maggots). Some generic song ended on the radio, and then a roiling Spanish guitar, electric and looming:

_She can do anything at all, have anything she pleases_   
_Power to change what she thinks is wrong, but what could she want with me, yeah?_

Daniel sighed, tweaked at the brain with a thread of annoyance that, once tugged, threatened to unravel all of it. The unseasonable heat, the work ahead of him, the stupid fucking song that followed him everywhere (he wasn’t sure if he preferred this one or Train’s _Drops of Jupiter_ —both were equally annoying and equally overplayed on every station this state had, and as Murphy would have it, Daniel's CD player had also stopped working about a month or two ago). If one of these things had happened by themselves, it would have been okay. But all at once? It was like his belt loop had gotten caught on the doorknob of the universe, all tiny happenings aligning just so to drive him out of his fucking mind.

Daniel changed the radio dial. 

_“Drama again this morning out of Washington D.C. surrounding the infamous case of The United States of America v. Umbrella Incorporated, with—”_

It was then that the right side of Daniel's Buick sunk with a slow, nefarious creep, impotent rubber slapping at the road. Daniel took a deep, stilling breath and pulled to the shoulder. Gravel scraped underneath his three remaining tires, and he folded his arms on the steering wheel, took a moment to rest his head on them.

_“—but all eyes were on Raccoon City survivor Jillian Valentine, formerly of the Special Tactics and Rescue Service, who is being hailed for defending a former Umbrella employee from what she says are ‘predatory and unconstitutional efforts to undermine’ the former employee’s right to free speech. Here’s a clip.”_

A woman came on the radio. A lawyer or something, maybe, or maybe someone who’d seen too much Law and Order. She sounded pissed, but then again everyone was pissed these days, and seemed to get more pissed the closer you got to Washington D.C. Daniel tuned out. Did he have a spare? A jack? Surely he had a jack, but had he used the spare already?

_“In a trial where most of the witnesses have been tight-lipped on the proceedings, human rights groups are describing Ms. Valentine as a surprising ally in the fight against legal overreach and victim’s rights. We’re being told the court’s lunch recess is coming to a close, so we’re going back to the proceedings, Jim, where former officer Rebecca Chambers is being questioned by Congress. Let’s listen in.”_

Daniel paused. He couldn’t listen to this. Not anymore. His fingers hesitated over the knob but he forced them, searched the airwaves for anything else—even Chris Cornell would be preferable to this, but the strains of music had disappeared under the bombastic voice of another radio announcer.

_“Frankly, it’s bullshit. And you know why it’s bullshit? Because zombies don’t exist. I know they call them infected or victims or whatever but lets call a spade a spade, alright, they’re fucking zombies, people in terrible Spirit Halloween costumes, probably on some set somewhere in liberal Hollywood. This is just another socialist scheme from the far left, folks, and don’t think it isn’t, oh no, because they’re not after Umbrella, they’re after tax dollars. That’s what they want, folks, first it’s the guys with the deepest pockets and then when those pockets are empty they’re coming for yours, so some fat-ass welfare queen in Detroit can sit on her can all day and—”_

Daniel twisted the volume knob to the left with a testy crank, and was left with blessed silence under the chitter of the only animals left in this EZ Bake Oven of a day; birds and insects. He climbed out of the driver’s side door, and set about righting what little he could, even if it was only a tire. It would have to do.

  
***

Washington, D.C.  
June 9, 1999  
9:00 AM

  
Rebecca didn’t swear on a Bible, the first and only witness in this particular trial to eschew the tradition. She opted to hold up one small hand next to her shoulder and affirm her commitment to telling the truth. Her round chin tilted up just so in what might have been defiance, but her large green eyes were fearful, her breathing nervous. 

“You may sit, Miss Chambers,” the Justice said. Rebecca did so. “Mister Bates, from New Jersey. You have the floor.”

“Thank you, Honor. So…” Mister Bates ruffled through the sheaf of paper before him. Pretended to be interested, though it could have been condescending theater. Rebecca couldn’t tell; his tone was friendly enough. “There’s quite a bit here about you, Miss Chambers,” he said, “a bit of a child genius, maybe it’s fair to say?”

Rebecca shook her head. “I just came from a home that took studies very seriously. The bar was set high.”

“That seems excessively modest. You graduated with a double-major in biochemistry and biology at eighteen? Is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you’re how old now?”

“I’m twenty-one.”

“And what are you doing now?”

“I’m a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

“At twenty-one.”

“That’s correct.”

“So it’s fair to say you’re a very intelligent person. You can look at patterns and identify trends. Would you say that’s true?”

“I’d say so.”

“So a trend I notice is there’s a very swift change in your resume. From police officer to…” he shuffled his papers, again, “immunology doctoral candidate some states away. Care to fill in the gaps?”

“There’s no gaps to fill in. I had a traumatic experience, decided that police work wasn’t for me, and my talents were better served in an educational and research capacity.”

“And you were hired by whom?”

“During my time with STARS?”

“Yes, Miss Chambers.”

“I was hired by Albert Wesker, Captain of STARS. I was admitted as a part of the Accelerations program, which provides clinical hours towards an approved field of study, given my medical knowledge.”

“Albert Wesker whom was also revealed to be a stakeholder and operations director of Umbrella’s direct rival Tricell International. Correct?”

“Correct. That’s him. He also worked for Umbrella.”

“Well…” Mister Bates laughed, sensibly, “that’s yet to be proven.”

“No it isn’t. It’s in the evidence.”

The man paused, a wide smile on his face. “Miss Chambers, are you here to argue, or are you here to testify?”

“I’m a scientist. Our entire job is precision,” Rebecca said, “if something you say is incorrect, and you build on it later, it can make more things incorrect down the line. So it’s important to clarify Albert Wesker also worked for Umbrella, per the evidence, as I assume we’ll be talking about that.”

“…right,” he said, sarcastic, “thank you for that.”

Rebecca nodded, blinked her thick eyelashes, as if she hadn’t read his tone as the insult it was and she was instead listening, rapt, to an interesting conversation. She told her story. Some people, enticed by the drama that pumped through such a lurid case like blood through a vessel, turned her testimony off halfway through. For those viewers, there was nothing to latch onto. None of Mister Kennedy’s honest, open insistence on the virtue of truth, even in the case of the unflattering. There was none of Doctor Hamilton’s dutiful, perhaps even self-sacrificial enduring of verbal whips, his discussions of human failing and cost, his sympathy—for and against. No arguments, no backhands. Just precision to the decimal point, told with a pair of sea-green eyes earnestly gazing out into the Congresspeople, the cameras, occasionally interrupted with a with sweet, slightly shy smile. Her testimony later on down the line would be used as an example for trial witnesses on how to conduct oneself. It was pure fact, delivered kindly and professionally, nothing added or left out.

Almost.

“So, I would assume someone very intelligent would be able concoct any number of stories that could cover for shortcomings,” Mister Bates said, “given how talented at noticing patterns and building on them they might be, as we’ve said. With both Mister Kennedy and Doctor Hamilton’s testimony, there were… pieces, that didn’t fit, even just so. But with yours, I can’t help but notice everything is very… clean. No loss of memory or things you’ve forgotten.”

“Objection,” Congressman Graham interrupted, “being intelligent doesn’t mean you’re a liar. We have no reason to assume Miss Chambers has mislead us.”

“Sustained.” The Justice said. “Rephrase.”

“What I’m saying is,” Mister Bates said, “normally trial witnesses have an organic decay of what they remember. Their responses are not pitch-perfect, like yours.”

“I suppose you could say that’s true,” Rebecca said, “but I have no story to cover. Like Mister Kennedy said, there’s things that happened and things that didn’t. I promised to testify about what did. But that’s very flattering, Mister Bates.” She smiled. “Thank you.”

They cut that day short, filling in the hours after Rebecca’s testimony with exhibits and physical evidence: samples and huge blown-up pieces of posterboard on easels that listed charts of numbers. More exciting, vital exhibits like broken metal phials, pieces of clothing splattered with blood long since decayed to flaking brown cakes inside clear plastic bags. When the trial let out, Rebecca stood and shook Congressman Graham’s hand, then let out a long breath.

From her left, a large hand touched against Rebecca's shoulder. When she turned, Chris gave her an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

“That was incredible,” he said. 

Rebecca laughed. A part of it _was_ incredible—Mister Bates of New Jersey, slimy and slippery Mister Bates—had gotten _so close_ , but still a mile away.

They had believed her. 

“Well, you know.” Rebecca said. “That’s me.” 

***

Barre, Vermont  
June 9, 1999  
5:06pm

  
This particular unit was being rented to a gaggle of college girls, all of whom lounged on furniture, fanning themselves with glossy magazines and unopened mail, as if interpretive dance of just how little they were enjoying the heat in the apartment would somehow make Daniel’s work faster. Daniel wished so as well; his back hurt. His neck hurt. His head was starting to pound, jumping in on the end of the train of misery that was his spine, protesting against too many hours spent bent over malfunctioning electronics and bending in every possible direction in an attempt to work within the dusty, dark confines of the spaces that housed the units. Daniel’s ponytail slipped off of his shoulder for the third time in so many minutes. He paused, sighed, then stood to tie it back, and banged his head against the cabinet. Two of the girls looked back at him, annoyed, then went back to fanning themselves.

A set of footsteps pattered against the hardwood floor. Daniel ignored them, trying to thread the head of his driver into a screw that was just out of his reach. He might have needed trigonometry to figure out how it had been installed in the first fucking place.

“Why don’t you take a break?” The girl asked. “Looks like hard work. You want something to drink?”   
  
Daniel paused and stood back up, carefully avoided the top of the cabinet. He wiped the sweat from under the fabric of his ballcap. “Some water might be okay.”

“Sure.” The girl’s gaze flickered over him. A deep part of him recoiled at being sized up so, like she was internally judging him, figuring him out. She left for the kitchen, and Daniel watched. She went to the fridge, not to the phone screwed to the wall. He released a breath. She returned with a plastic bottle of water with a white label. Daniel unscrewed the cap, and took a healthy gulp. 

“I’m gonna turn it on,” said one of the girls, “I have to study this stupid thing for AP Intro, anyway. Might as well just watch while it’s going on.”

One of the girls heaved a great, testy sigh, rolled onto her bare feet, and slapped away into her room. 

“What’s her problem?” One of the other girls said.

“What’s _not_?” They all laughed.

_“Yesterday in the hotly contested trial of Umbrella Incorporated, emotional testimony from Doctor George Hamilton, a trauma surgeon at Raccoon City’s medical center. Doctor Hamilton recounted stories of incredible amounts of loss, testifying under oath that—”_

“Shit, it’s over already? …well, he’s pretty hot.” 

“He’s single,” said another, “he said his _ex_ -wife.”

“Ew,” said the first girl, “if you want some zombie doctor dick, that’s all you.”

“Sorry about them,” the girl beside Daniel said, with a long-suffering smile, “they’re always fighting. When the semester started everyone got along, but…” she sighed. “You know.”

Daniel took another gulp of his water to fill the silence. Umbrella this, Umbrella that. Daniel was sick and fucking tired of hearing about Umbrella; he’d done his best to block this whole sordid affair out of his brain, and had succeeded, until today. It was inescapable. Then, he made the mistake of looking at the television screen, and felt something hard and eventual pelt against his mental defenses. 

“Yeah.” He said, finally.

The unit beside him puffed out a gust of rancid air and then rattled to life, hummed and clicked with renewed vigor. _Thank GOD_ , said one girl, tossing her head of thick blonde hair back, dramatic. Daniel thanked his host for the water, tossed the bottle in the recycling bin on the way outside, and drug himself down the stairs to his car before they could decide that the successful repair meant more conversation.

Daniel drove to a familiar installation after long, hot days like this: a pub lit by blinking neon lights calling out the name of brands of beer, built on a corner, between a fried chicken shack and a gas station run by a Palestinian couple. He opened the door and took off his hat, shook his hair out. Ike, the guy behind the bar, smiled at Daniel as soon as he saw him. Ike was always quick with a joke or a friendly welcome. His presence was comforting and jovial, like a huge, black-skinned Buddha given life through some sort of magic spell.

“Evening Dan,” Ike said. His white t-shirt and smock were spattered with grease stains. “Usual?”

“Sounds great,” Daniel said, and sat on a stool. Every muscle in his body let out a sigh of relief and he rubbed his face. When he removed his hand, Ike had already placed down a glass of amber beer, capped with a thick head of white foam. Daniel took a greedy swig.

“Hey. Hey,” said a man, dressed in a cheap grey suit a few sizes too large for him. Daniel didn’t recognize him. The man pointed at the box television mounted over the mirrored backsplash behind the bar. “Turn it on Fox. I got family in D.C. and they said some shit went down today.”

Daniel sighed. Not here, too. This might have been the quickest drink in history. When no protests presented themselves, Ike turned and aimed the remote at the set.

_Today in news out of Washington, Rebecca Chambers, a member of the storied Special Tactics and Rescue Service—or STARS—took the stand to tell her side of the story. Former Officer Chambers recalled a harrowing journey full of danger and betrayal, a recount that was pressed for hours by members of Congress._

“I’d like to press _her_ for hours,” said one of the men at the bar. A smattered, knowing round of chuckles responded. Silent, Daniel cracked open a peanut, chewed the solid flesh, threw the shell into a nearby metal bucket that doubled as a trash can. 

_Last night’s apartment fire is being labeled witness intimidation by Jill Valentine, the de facto spokesperson for the witnesses in this trial. She had this to say:_

A pretty brunette with bright gray-blue eyes appeared on the screen, a freeze-frame of a picture from some kind of court room. She was looking directly at the camera, her expression impassive but alert. Her words were typed in large white font alongside her photo as she spoke.

_“I absolutely think it is witness intimidation. Just last night we lost a good man, Doctor Raj Behara of the Federal Bioterror Commission, to a supposed gas leak. Nurses, doctors, patients, all dead with no further explanation. Then the next night, two days before I am slated to testify, my apartment building goes up in flames and three people are killed. I don’t think these are coincidences. As I’ve said before, this is how Umbrella operates. They killed an entire city worth of people and now they’re killing more people to cover it up, and the fact they’re doing it in plain sight—with nobody is calling them on it—is just emboldening them.”_

The anchor’s voice.

_“So you think it was Umbrella that did this? You don’t think that’s sort of… trending in the direction of being a baseless conspiracy theory?”_

_“Yes, I do think it was Umbrella that did this. And I also think that calling a violent trend a baseless conspiracy theory while innocent people are losing their lives is giving Umbrella the benefit of the doubt, so before I spending my energy answering that question, I’d like for you to tell your viewers if Umbrella is one of your advertisers.”_

_“Even if Umbrella is one of our advertisers, that doesn’t mean that our journalists are trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, as you say.”_

_“Okay. I think I’ve got my answer.”_

Later, Congressman James Graham appeared to support Miss Valentine’s opinion on the matter:

_“Earlier Jillian Valentine was on air with us, suggesting if not outright stating that the violence in D.C. is somehow connected to the United States v. Umbrella Incorporated. Your thoughts?”_

_“Well, my thoughts are that we should probably listen to the people who’ve been fighting this fight, and not questioning the integrity of a woman who's shown time and again that she’s willing to proverbially and literally throw herself into the fire for our safety. She’s earned our trust—the trend is definitely suspect. And with Umbrella, nothing is just suspect, so we’ll see where it goes.”_

“Attacking the witnesses now. _Does_ seem pretty suspect...” Ike said, a note of wonder in his voice while he wiped down the inside of a glass with a clean rag. His dark eyes studied the lurid car-crash nightmare told in fuzzy, shaking clips of human violence. Daniel had seen them by now—everybody in America had. It somehow didn’t make them easier to digest. And if it hadn’t by now, time’s amnesiac magic probably held no sway here. 

Daniel took a long swig of his beer. The man beside him scoffed, struck a match on the carbon strip run down the side of its book, and lit the cigarette perched between his lips. His oily blond hair reflected the light.

“There’s always something going on in that shithole,” he said, “D.C., I mean. Probably best if Umbrella just offs all those fucking yahoos and calls it a day. You got innocent people dying, the economy’s probably gonna fucking tank… all because of what? Natural disasters happen all the god damned time. Just let those poor people rest in peace.”

“Hey,” Ike said, stern. “Can that shit in my bar, man. There could be cops in here.”

Daniel felt his throat become solid with unspoken words that fought to claw their way out of his mouth and into the air. He was not a weak-willed man; he’d proven that over and over, and his opinions were not so flimsy to be swayed by one greasy drunk in a bar. But he was open to being convinced. In the end, he pursed his lips and said nothing, drained the last of his glass.

“What do you think, Dan?” Said Ike. Daniel glanced up to him.

“Not into politics.” Daniel said, with a note of finality. His eyes were on the image of an entire building engulfed in robes of orange-and-yellow flame from a vantage point high in the sky. He stood and put down a crumpled, dirty ten dollar bill. Ike nodded in recognition and thanks, shoved the note into the front pocket of his smock.

“A-fuckin’-men,” said the man beside him, Mr. Kill-Em-All-And-Let-God-Sort-Em-Out. “Keep it that way. Just a bunch of stuffed-shirt idiots anyway. They don’t know shit.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said, “right.”

The heat of the day had died into a tepid humidity that clung to the chilly breeze, the last kick of a burst of heat that was being thrown out on its ass for coming to the party too early. Daniel got into his beat up Buick, and sat in thought for a long few minutes. Some things had to be set right. _You got innocent people dying, the economy’s probably gonna fucking tank. Probably best if Umbrella just offs all those fucking yahoos…_

Daniel was just one guy, with no dreams or ambitions to change much of anything except for his clothes or maybe a lightbulb here or there. But there were things that had to be done, now that he knew where they were. If only for his own peace of mind. Things that he might not get a chance to do again if he let this opportunity slip.

He checked the glove compartment. His trusty 1911 sat in silent compliance, its slide catch gleaming in the dim sodium glow of the lights outside Ike’s bar. He closed the glove compartment. 

Couldn’t be too sure. There were crazy people everywhere.

***

Washington, D.C.  
Later that Night

  
Chris and Rebecca were unique in that they had nobody to talk to, nobody to hobnob with after the trial let out. Chris seemed to avoid wherever Jill and her new boyfriend were like the plague—which Rebecca didn’t think of as strange. She wasn’t really sure Jill and Chris were dating back in the day, but Rebecca wouldn’t want a new partner rubbed in her face either, and not one that was Tall, Dark, and Handsome or as well-liked as this guy apparently was. All of Chris’ friends grouped around the two of them, a good-looking, sweet little nucleus in the middle of their orbit, and Chris was happy to excuse himself from the festivities. He insisted on escorting Rebecca home—”With all the explosions and fires, who knows what they’ll try to pull.” 

Rebecca didn’t deny the offer. The two of them rode in Chris’ truck to some burger joint nearby where they indulged in greasy food and milkshakes, talked like old friends. He seemed relieved to have somebody around, somebody who understood. Rebecca was happy to oblige. The two talked deep into the night, and when Rebecca began to yawn and stumble over her words out of fatigue, Chris paid for their meal and shuttled them away.

Chris dropped her off outside the door to the hotel, kept the engine running. Rebecca reached across the console and the e-brake and gave him a hug. Chris never knew how to respond to simple human affection, not then and not now, but he tried. He hugged her with one arm, the injured one. Crushed her close. Still didn’t know his own strength, either.

“I appreciate you looking out for me,” Rebecca said, “it was really nice catching up.”

“It was,” Chris offered her a crooked smile. “Good job today. You be careful, okay?”

Rebecca nodded. “Always am.”

She hopped down out of the cab and waved to him. Chris honked the horn once, waved back, and then pulled away into the darkness, the red brake-lights of his truck bouncing and wobbling into the night like a pair of eyes that winked out of view and into the fog. When Rebecca attempted to open her door, the key would no longer fit. The large white fob read her room number—301. Fatigue had not quite set in that deep yet, at least. She walked back to the front desk.

"Oh," the girl in the business suit behind the desk said, "your husband called earlier and said you'd lost your key, so we swapped out the lock."

Rebecca smiled, confused. "I'm not married."

The girl raised her eyebrows. "Hm. That's what it says here in the notes... well, I'm not sure. Probably just a mix-up. Here's your new key."

Rebecca considered pressing the issue, but the societal forces of Being Nice—don't rock the boat, don't make a scene—and her mental fatigue convinced her not to.

"Probably. Thank you."

Rebecca trudged back to her door, which now obediently opened with the click of tumblers. She checked the room, not entirely convinced of the desk girl's conclusion, but when she found nobody, Rebecca assured herself she was being paranoid. She showered, and fell fast asleep diagonally across her hotel bed.

When the banging on her room door sounded and plucked her abruptly from her sleep, it was nearly 5am.

Rebecca craned her head up. Her body was still swallowed by one of the bathrobes supplied by the hotel, its plush white collar crowded her throat like the cowl of some species of bird, flocked with feathers but bone underneath, slender and hollow. Rebecca stood and crossed the room, pulled the door open halfway, peeking her tired, lined face into the gap. 

The unfamiliar figure on the other side spelled immediate danger, tall and broad, like opening a door straight into the arms of a towering scarecrow. _**Daniel**_ , his nametag said, shining thread embroidered against a white canvas background, enclosed by a border. His light blue collared shirt, smeared grey with ash or sweat or dirt, gave the impression that a gas station attendant, or maybe a sorely lost mechanic, had come to visit her at some five in the morning. Though strange, none of this was what gave Rebecca pause, made her heart seize and squeeze with a breed of free-floating panic; it was the fact that she couldn’t see his face, only the thick, dark gloss of a beard, two or three inches long. His contours and angles obscured by a wedge of shadow beneath the bill of his ballcap, denim-blue and faded to white threads around the edge. She knew his name. But if she had to, she couldn’t identify him in a lineup.

“Can I help you?” Rebecca asked. She put on her best forceful voice. Tried to let him know she meant business. Even to her own ears, it sounded thin like paper, frightened. 

The man named Daniel looked to each of his sides, up and down the hallway. 

“Look,” he said in a quiet, raspy smoker’s rattle. His voice perked Rebecca’s ear, cocked to danger on the wind like a prey animal, deciding whether to fight or run. “I’ve been driving all night. Can I come in?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Rebecca said, and moved to shut the door. “You’ve got the wrong room. Goodnight.”

The door hit against one of Daniel’s workboots with a dull, defeated thump, blocked from meeting its jamb.

“Just wait a minute.” He said. 

“I’m calling the police,” Rebecca’s plans for the door to end this encounter were abandoned as fast as they’d been imagined. Daniel pushed the door opened and approached; Rebecca drew in a sharp breath to fuel a scream for help. One of his hands, strong and long enough to palm her head like a basketball, buffered hot and calloused against the bottom half of her face. The scream rang out, but spiraled into little more than a muffled cry against his skin. 

“Don’t do that,” he said, and with his other hand grabbed the bill of his hat, pulled it off of his head. A flock of stray black baby-hairs, too short to reach the ponytail on the back of his head but too long and thick to stay in place with the hat missing, fell about the sides of his face. “All this time, and _now’s_ when you narc me out?”

As fast as Rebecca’s mind worked, as fine-tuned to detail and meaning and nuance a machine as ever there was, the meaning of the voice, the face, the very situation clouded her faculties. Nothing matched the images; there were no black slash marks up and down one arm. A thick, dark beard had taken the place of the sharp, wide bone structure. Free from the obscuring shadows, his brow was strong, dark, tilted; his eyes, almond-shaped, bore a permanent squint. Rebecca quieted, and he removed his hand from her face.

“…Billy?” Rebecca asked. Something blocked her breath and it came out as a weak, strangled whisper.

“Ah ah. Daniel,” he said, indicating his nametag with a tap of a callused finger. He smiled, as if enjoying having revealed the solution to a puzzle she hadn’t first figured out for herself. “But close enough.”

“I just—how did you— _when_? Your…” Rebecca stopped and laughed at her own sudden strike of inarticulate confusion. “Sorry. It’s just… I wasn’t expecting… you look so… different. Like _good_ different! Not like you… oh, man.” She turned a mortified shade of pink. He didn’t seem to notice, busy pulling his long black hair from the tie that held it fast to the back of his head, shook his fingers through it until it laid as naturally as it would after being crammed under a hat for so many hours. “You know what I’m trying to say.”

Billy just laughed at her, like he was in on some kind of joke that hadn’t been shared. “Good to see you too, kiddo. Look—I’m not gonna take much of your time, but I saw you on the TV and didn’t know how else to… you know… get in touch.”

“At least come in and rest.” Rebecca said, her panic and discomfort forgotten under the weight of someone to care for, some wound to mend. “I have this room for the rest of the week. I can get you some breakfast?”

“No need to do all that,” he said, “just saw that you were around, too. And wanted to…” he trailed off, “I wanted to say thank you. And… I watched yesterday. You did a good job.” The words caught, difficult to free at first. “Not easy to do what you did.”

Rebecca sighed. “You saw, huh?”

Billy nodded. “Yeah.”

“Not my best outing… but it brought you here, so it’s looking better and better by the second.” Billy... no, no. Daniel. _Daniel_ looked down, pressing his hands on the edges of his hat. Rebecca spoke again. “How have you been? Its been… I was worried.”

“Life’s… good. It’s good.” He took a breath in. “You ever… gone on a run or working during a long hot day and then had a beer? A real cold one, right when you needed it.”

Rebecca laughed. “What?”

Daniel looked serious. “Have you?”

“Of course.”

“It's a weird way to say it, but it's all I keep thinking of. I didn’t think I’d ever get that feeling again. You know? A beer. Or a steak, when you’re real hungry and the direct deposit just hit. Listening to music—going to a concert. I always wanted to see Iron Maiden, you know? And I thought I’d never get to. But I went, just in April, when they were in New York.” A beat of silence between them. “Guess what I’m trying to say is—you gave all of it back to me. All of that was going to be gone, forever. No more beer, no more payday steaks, and definitely no Maiden. But I got to experience it. Because you trusted me. You’re the first person who’s done that in a long time.” He paused. “So… thanks.”

It was a strange thing, the way the air softened, malleable and thick like butter. “Are you sure you can’t stay for a while?”

Daniel shook his head, pulled his hat back over the bulk of his hair. “Nah. Don’t want to mess up what you’ve got going on. I just saw you were in the neighborhood, and thought this is better than an email. You know. Little more personal.”

“Thank you for coming.” Then, “I’m sorry I slammed the door on your foot.”

There she was, always so concerned about the niceties, the manners, the hurts. “Small price to pay. Well... I’ll see you around.”

Daniel turned and left without looking at her. He had never been nervous around women, and “nervous” wasn’t quite right for what he was feeling; it was closer to a jumping, jittering emptiness, all else blocked out in the effort to still himself and make sense of what had just happened. He had said his piece, expressed his thanks, and got out of there before something could change his mind. Exactly what he’d intended. Clean. In and out, no problem, no mess. But like all best laid plans, there were pebbles that stuck in the machinery, and they made the thoughts back up and spew smoke; time’s abrasive march had worn the edges of his memories round and smooth, eaten away at details that now were fresh, painted over in brighter detail. She was smaller than he remembered, compact and tiny. But more than the physical, he remembered the irony of, despite their size disparities, how safe he felt in her presence.

Daniel waited for a car to pass. It kicked up a great, wet, rushing sound against the rain on the pavement. When his key was in the door, footsteps fast and light approached behind him. Rebecca stopped a few paces away; she had thrown on a white dress shirt and a pair of black shorts. Grey spots of translucence pattered against her shoulders from above and she took a great sudden suck of air, then said, faster than comfortable speech: “Here’s my email.” She thrust a small rectangular sheet of paper in his direction, emblazoned with the hotel’s insignia. “We should keep in touch. More often than once a year, at least.”

Daniel leaned against the roof of the car, regarded her with squinted eyes like he wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly, or if he had, he was critical of what was communicated. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“Well, I knew this guy… Billy? Kind of rough around the edges. _Lot_ of baggage. _He_ might have been a bad idea… but he’s got this friend who seems pretty nice.” She tilted one of her slender shoulders in an affable shrug. “I might like to get to know him better. You know?”

Daniel puffed a halfhearted laugh from somewhere dry and dusty in his chest. “This new guy might have baggage too. You don’t even know him. Maybe he just seems nice.”

“Well… he drove all the way from Vermont to see me. I call that pretty nice.” To his look of confusion she said: “Your plates. And you said you drove all night--you’ve got dirt all over your shirt. Nobody’s just around in their old work clothes at five in the morning.” She gestured with the paper again. “Take it. It’s getting wet.”

“Well…” Daniel said, struck with sudden distrust. Not of the woman before him, but of something important finally going well. Going _right_. It had been so much time since anything he’d done had worked out in his favor that he’d forgotten what that felt like. Now it felt suspiciously like a rug, plush and soft under his tired feet, waiting to be yanked out and sending him tumbling to the floor. Charlie Brown revving up to kick his football, only to have it snatched away and leave him with nothing but a mouthful of mud and a mind full of wonder at his own gullibility. 

Daniel accepted the paper, looked it over. “Yeah. I mean—I can try. No promises.”

“Of course.” Rebecca said. Her face didn’t look like hope or happiness. She crossed her thin arms across her chest to stave off the cold rain as it rolled down her skin. “Drive safe, okay?”

“You got it.”

“Thanks for coming. I mean it. This meant a lot to me.” She spoke with an earnestness that sounded like fragility. Like presenting something easily broken for safekeeping. Daniel couldn’t decide if that capacity for vulnerability after all she had seen, they had seen together, was foolish naivete or the enviable capacity of a heart much larger than his. 

Maybe it was both. 

Rebecca turned, walked the way she came through the rain. The slight dip of her head craned on a long neck, the way she hugged herself against the early morning cold, the receding of her back into the unknown; it all filtered into place in his mind like a candle being lit in a dark window. His brain threw up another obstruction. Another doubt. That same force, that eventuality, struck against it. Smashed it into glittering chips that fell around his feet.

“Hey,” Daniel called after her. It sounded like someone else’s voice, unsure and tense. Maybe it _was_ someone else's voice.

Rebecca turned and looked at him, her green eyes wide, blinking and inquisitive. 

“You know,” he said, “now that you mention it, I am kind of hungry. You uh… have time to maybe go get a coffee? Or… something?”

There was a moment of silence. A smile spread slow and sweet over Rebecca's face. 

“Coffee sounds great.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (( Hi everyone!! Hope you’re staying safe, warm, and healthy!
> 
> I’m sorry I haven’t responded to comments! I go by the AO3 mailing system and it’s not been working so hot apparently :( I had no idea. So sorry! 😩
> 
> Credits: The song quoted in the beginning of the chapter is “Can’t Change Me” by Chris Cornell. Ah, those late 90s bangers 🖤 ))


	34. Microaggression

Carlos ducked his head low to avoid hitting it against the frame of the car, and held the door for Jill. She scooted on her backside to the end of the velvety seat, knees together, told Rodrigo (the driver—though she didn’t know his name, Carlos had passively memorized it, the way he did with just about everyone he came into contact with daily) "thank you", and then swung her legs to the side and climbed out of the cab. The smile she gave Carlos was drawn and tired, the kind of smile that might have accompanied a hung head or uncomfortable conversation. 

“How’re we doing?” Carlos asked. He clapped the car door shut.

“We’re doing.” The sky overhead was the color of iron, and Jill’s eyes looked a little grayer today than normal. “It’s a start.”

Carlos nodded, but couldn’t bring himself to smile. The distant unhappiness on her face pulled at him, presented him with the sudden, deep need to _fix_. To repair or cauterize or move or… something. But there were no ragged seams that could be mended with supportive words, no physical bulwarks that could be erected, no punches that could be swung to stem the tide of what was about to happen. Once again Carlos found himself left on the periphery to watch, and hope his support was enough. He heard himself sigh.

“It’s okay.” Jill said, and touched his hand, her fingers slim and cool against his own. “Go on. I’ll wait by the steps.”

“I’ll be right there.” Carlos watched her walk away. With some difficulty, he turned his attention to the cab driver, Rodrigo, through the open passenger-side window of the car. Carlos handed Rodrigo a touch-worn twenty dollar bill, and the man’s dark, shining face split in a wide off-white smile, pockmarked with missing teeth. “We good on five, like normal?”

“I get as close as I can. It’s supposed to rain like hell today. But I’ll be here.” In his thick island accent, here sounded like _hee-ah_ , and it took a moment for Carlos’ brain to parse what he was hearing. “You tell her to smile or her face will stick like that. She’s too pretty to go ‘round frowning all day.”

Carlos puffed a laugh through his nose. “Yeah, you tell her that and see how it goes.”

The car pulled into traffic and when Carlos turned away, Jill stood, staring at the tall metal pole jutting to the sky, straight and proud beside the staircase. Upon it in a fitful, damp summer’s wind flapped and rippled an American flag, wound only halfway up its mast. Carlos came to a stop beside her.

“It’s not your fault.” Carlos said. “None of it. You know that, right?”

“I know. But…” Jill said, gently, after a moment. She blinked, then lowered her eyes to the ground. “Knowing and feeling are different. I’ll just feel better when this is over. Whatever happens.”

They mounted the white stone steps together in silence. Carlos pushed the redwood door open by its heavy horizontal bronze bar. A copse of people waited inside, dallying and making idle chatter. When he spotted them in their business suits, microphones and cameras and lighting rigs held at their sides, their heads had already turned to the noise of the opening door. It was only once Jill ducked her head under Carlos’ arm and strode into the hall that they began to stir, sidling close to the metal detector that separated the entrance from the lobby, jockeying for the closest position like a nest of hungry insects. Carlos frowned.

“They could give you a fuckin’ second,” he grumbled. 

Jill gave him a look of warmth and assurance, then left him where he stood. 

A familiar figure split from the approaching crowd. The attorney’s expression was not calm, not ringed around the edges with smug like rust in a sink drain. He just looked tired. Unimpressed. Like he was fighting off a headache. He stopped in Carlos’ path and proffered another piece of paper from his leather folder. The third this week. Carlos accepted the paper, gave it a cursory glance—the language was more severe, sure, but the message was familiar—then crossed his arms to watch Jill work her magic. The attorney turned as well, and for a moment of brief respite, they watched together as the cameras shuttered and projected their lights onto Jill’s small, solid form. The two men looked more like the coworkers they may once have been than generals in opposing armies brought to a momentary ceasefire.

“You know what I’m going to say.” The attorney said quietly, aside.

“Probably,” Carlos responded. “NDA?”

“Yes. NDA.” When Carlos didn’t respond, he continued. “You know what you signed. Why make this difficult for everyone?” 

It was phrased pleasantly enough, with a gentleman’s lilt of professionalism. A nod to the Queensbury Rules of the building in which they found themselves, a white marble mask with glittering gilded edges, one that concealed the bloodiest street fight Carlos had ever been involved in. Carlos knew what the guy really meant to say— _me. Why make this difficult for **me**? Why be a dick? My boss is watching and you’re making me look like an idiot. All you need to do is park your huge dumb ass somewhere else for a few days, then I can retire, but no, I had to draw straws and got **you**. Right at the end._

Carlos thought about what he wanted to say, then indicated Jill with a point. “You see her?”

“Yes.”

“And all those people crowded around her?”

A sigh. “Yes.”

“Well,” Carlos said, and left it. He turned to the man beside him. “So since we’re friends now, why’re _you_ still here? You’ve gotta know this isn’t going well for your guys. Turned in your two weeks yet?”

The smallest flicker of doubt; a twitch on the corner of a thin, downturned mouth. Then he was buttoned up again, professional.

“Good day, Mr. Oliveira,” the attorney said, and was gone.

  
***

The olive-green-grey carpet, studded with shapes that looked like diamonds, was worn from years of foot-traffic. Hardwood chairs, mostly occupied, lined an aisle. The room stretched on forever, like walking down a telescoping hallway towards impending doom.

Congressman Graham stood waiting, one hand in the pocket of his dark dress pants. Jill approached, and the faintest trace of a smile tilted his features into an expression that could have been concern or amusement.

“You alright?” He asked.

Jill nodded, a nervy, short jerk of her head. “Let’s just get this done.”

“You’ll be fine. I’ll be here with you. These guys are nothing. Just tell them what you know.”

From beyond, the boom of an official-sounding voice cut over the clamor and idle chatter of the chamber. “If the witness could please come to the floor for swearing in.”

Jill arranged the shift around her and smoothed her skirt. Out of habit, perhaps, she glanced over her shoulder; the line of faces were wide eyed, most of them smiling with encouragement. Carlos’ was not; between his dark suit and thoughtful expression, he cut an undertaker’s image, uncharacteristically serious. 

Jill opened the waist-high wooden door. A man in a black-and-tan baliff’s outfit presented a thick gilded Bible upon which she set one hand and pledged to tell the truth. She then sat at the table, pulled herself close, and settled in beside Congressman Graham. The room was huge, the tower of desks before her immense and intimidating, and she felt sick, had to still her breath intentionally to keep from getting dizzy. She folded her hands together on the table.

The Justice spoke. “Mrs. Nelson of Arizona. You may begin.”

Beside Jill, the Congressman tucked his lips together in distaste, then straightened his face.

“Thank you, Your Honor. Good morning,” spoke a woman with nearly-white hair cut short in a sensible bob around her jaw. She wore rectangular metal glasses and a string of pearls. The seams of a black business sat structured and high over her thin shoulders as she craned her head forward towards a microphone on a thin wire stand by her mouth. “Please state your name.”

Jill did. Her voice, projected by her own microphone, sounded strange and alarming.

“Just to touch on your record—it says here you’re former US Army. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“It says here you trained with Delta Force.” The congresswoman’s eyebrows fluted up. “Can you explain what that is?”

“Army Special Forces. We were selected to train with G Squadron of Delta Force as a part of my unit’s support detail.”

“And what was covered in that training?”

“Security and explosives ordinance disposal. I was taught to crack codes, pick locks, and disable explosive devices we encountered as a part of our deployment to the middle east in 1993.”

“Very impressive. Thank you for your service.” The Congresswoman, with her eyes on her papers, moved on with a speed that indicated the thanks as cursory. “And you were a police officer in Raccoon City, Indiana, for how many years?”

“Four years.”

“Can you please state your job duties, official title, and who you reported to.”

Jill did.

“So — your service records show you were actually suspended from your position on the STARS team, two months before the incident in Raccoon City. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“Can you please tell the committee for the reason for your dismissal?”

“Investigations outside of the bounds of my normal, assigned duties.”

“So, you were investigating something that shouldn’t have been. Is that correct?”

“I was investigating an incident in which I was directly involved — the initial outbreak at the Arklay estate in the Arklay mountains. We were not briefed on it being out of scope. Only after my report was submitted was it rejected for being so.”

“And have you had a report rejected before?”

“No.”

“You were a member of STARS - the description we have here is that STARS were a wilderness rescue squad, much like SWAT teams in urban areas. Not a team of detectives. Would you say that’s correct, Miss Valentine?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“So it could stand to reason that investigating an incident could be redundant, and perhaps a waste the resources of the Raccoon City police department, if it were already being investigated by another party?”

“In that case, yes.”

“Can you tell us whether or not there was anybody else investigating this incident?”

“I don’t know. As far as we were told, the investigation as a whole was closed.”

“Did you work closely with the detective teams?”

“No.”

“So you wouldn’t know whether or not they were investigating the incident and if your investigations would have been redundant, then.”

“No. We had no way to know it was already underway by another department. The report was rejected with no reason given other than it being out of my scope. Then later the entire STARS team was disbanded. Not just me.”

“Would you be told if it was being investigated by another department?”

“That’s up to the commanding officer. But yes, we would have been, in my experience.” 

“And who was the commanding officer who rejected your reports, and then suspended you?”

“The Chief of Police, Brian Irons. Not being told is very strange, especially if there was money being wasted.”

“I agree. Very strange. So we’re to believe your commanding officer, suddenly, after years of working together just needed to get rid of you? Did Chief of Police Brian Irons ever indicate wanting to fire or suspend you?”

“No. I was sent to the Arklay Mountains because our team was the best in the squad. He would not have sent someone he didn’t trust.”

“And you have no prior connections to Umbrella.”

“Not before July sixth, no.”

“If you would be so kind, please explain what happened on July sixth at the Arklay Estate, Miss Valentine, ending with the events of October first.”

The table shook. When Jill looked down, it was her own fingers that trembled on its lacquered top. Her throat was suddenly dry as dust, her face prickled with needles, her lips numb. Beside her, a gentle nudge; when Jill looked up, Congressman Graham’s freckle-tanned face was closer, his eyes empathetic.

“Do you need a break?” He whispered.

Jill shook her head, quick and brief. 

“Of c-course,” Jill said to the Congresswoman, and cleared her throat. “Of course.”

It was an immense amount of talking, but the talking wasn’t worse than the remembering. Sympathetic murmurs and gasps of muted shock echoed at certain points of violence or loss. When Jill’s tale ended, the Congresswoman was looking at her with shrewd, scrutinizing eyes. 

“It sounds quite traumatic, the way you have told it.”

“It was.”

“Russian intelligence has a report that you were working closely with the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service during the incident in Raccoon City. Did you have contact with any members of Echo team during that time?”

Jill paused, and then shook her head. “I did have close contact with an Umbrella team, but I’m not sure if it was that specific team.”

“Echo team lead by Captain Mikhail Viktor, Miss Valentine. Were you in contact with them, or not?”

“Yes. That team, yes.”

“Interesting.” The congresswoman said, squinting, as if she was under the impression this was the kicker, the trap, that Jill had somehow strangled herself on the rope she swung from. “So — just for my own recollection — just months before the incident in Raccoon City, from your account, Umbrella committed atrocities so damning they attempted to silence you from investigating them.”

“Yes.”

“And then you teamed up with them. You’re a very forgiving person, Miss Valentine, or so the record would have us believe. Explain.”

“A unit of Umbrella’s Biohazard Countermeasure Service were rescuing civilians, and asked for my help. Those people were my friends and neighbors, so I agreed, despite my distaste for their employer.”

“A full unit of armed mercenaries asked for the help of one, and you’ll excuse me saying so… female police officer to evacuate their survivors? That’s a little unrealistic, wouldn’t you say?”

Carlos and Kevin winced at the same time in the disbelief of men who were watching a fight being picked that they knew would end with sprays of viscera and bloody chunks on the walls. Jill adjusted her sitting position, and Carlos recognized it well; it was one of her personal tells, as close to a pair of boxing gloves being stripped off as anything he’d ever seen. Claire crossed her arms tight over her chest and shook her head, eyes ground into slits.

“ORDER!” Boomed the Justice.

“No. I disagree that it’s unrealistic.” Jill replied, after the buzz died.

A pause. “I figured you would. Miss Valentine, can you please state your height?”

“Five-foot-five.”

“And your weight?”

“One hundred and twenty five pounds.”

The Congresswoman let it hang in the air. “So, again… now, I’m not saying a woman can’t do what is defined as a man’s job. Clearly,” she chuckled, “or neither of us would be sitting here. However, it doesn’t make sense. A team of men, the vast majority I would assume much larger than you, armed with all manner of state-of-the-art weaponry, trained in the dissolution of bioweapons… asked a five-foot-five, one-hundred twenty-five pound policewoman for help in fighting those bioweapons and rescuing civilians? They didn’t evacuate you as one of those civilians, instead?”

“Yes,” Jill fought to keep her face still. She achieved it, but only just slightly, took a stilling breath in so she could project the vocal tone she needed - calm, warm, professional, even though her angry heart hammered at her ribs and her stomach felt like a hot stone, heavy in her abdomen. “They did ask me for help, and they did not attempt to evacuate me. I’ll remind Madam Congresswoman, with all due respect, they didn’t ask ‘a woman’; they asked a member of STARS. I knew the area, the people, the surrounding landscape. I had survived the Arklay Mansion Incident by myself, as well as a tour in the Middle East with the Army. Evacuating civilians in unfamiliar terrain under high pressure and environmental—”

The Congresswoman cut her off. “Thank you, Miss Valentine, we don’t need your resume to answer the question. That’ll be all.”

“I’m not finished.” Jill replied, and the Congresswoman looked at her over the steel frames of her expensive-looking glasses, as if she hadn’t heard Jill correctly. “I have a minute to answer your question, and I’m going to use the rest of my time. If I may continue.” 

There was a tensed hush. If Jill had hauled off and slapped the blonde woman sitting above and away from her, it might have warranted the same reaction. Congressman Graham looked to the Justice atop his tower of desks, who then said, “Proceed. Congresswoman, if you’re going to ask questions, please give the witness time to answer. And Miss Valentine, I trust you to stay on topic in your answers.”

“Yes, thank you.” Jill continued. “Evacuating civilians in unfamiliar terrain under high pressure and environmental disaster was, quite literally, my job. The members of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service — of whom none were natives of Raccoon City — did ask me for help as I had experience with both the area, and the specific bioweapons we were trying to evacuate the civilians from. I was the expert, and they consulted me for advice and assistance. Much like you are right now.”

“And did any of those civilians escape?”

“No. Not to my knowledge.”

“But you did.”

“Yes.”

“Along with a member of this UBCS compatriot who our intelligence reflects used a single dose of the vaccine on you.”

“Correct.”

“And we’re to believe you are telling us that you had no interest in Umbrella, yourself, nor they in you.”

“Before July sixth, no.”

“That Umbrella simply took the vaccine and used it on the first person they saw, which happened to be someone they tried to kill a few months earlier and then stopped from reporting them trying to kill her... and then they used their only dose of the vaccine to ensure your survival.”

“Objection,” Graham said, “the witness can’t speak to machinations of what someone else thinks or does, she’s not a psychic.”

“Sustained,” the Justice rubbed his forehead, “but I am curious about this as well. Rephrase, Congresswoman.”

“If you have no interest in Umbrella as a company, or they in you, I’d like you to explain how Umbrella came to the conclusion of using their vaccine on you if we are to also believe your story about their conspiracy to doom Raccoon City. As you experienced it. Unless there’s something in your story that I’m misunderstanding?”

“You are misunderstanding, yes.” Jill said. Another quiet thunder in the crowd.

“Oh?” The Congresswoman said, an edge to her voice. “So, explain. Make me understand, Miss Valentine.”

“’Umbrella’ did not administer the vaccine. An employee of a company is not that company, and as irresponsible as Umbrella has been, they’re not a monolith. Not Umbrella, but a person employed by Umbrella using their own judgment, administered it—” 

“Miss Valentine.” The Congresswoman sighed, interjecting. “This is semantics. You’re belaboring the point.”

“I’m not done, thank you, Madam Congresswoman. You didn’t understand my account, so I’m clarifying. If I may continue.”

Silence.

“Continue,” the congresswoman said. Hither, thither, makes no difference to me, said the light tone in her voice.

“Umbrella is not a monolith and its employees are people, many of which had no way of knowing what was happening at the upper levels. I found many pieces of evidence that reflect this, which I’ve turned over to Congressman Graham. That is exactly what happened to both myself and the members of STARS, as well — we were under the direction of a man who ultimately turned out to be a member of Umbrella, Albert Wesker. The only difference here is the employee of Umbrella who gave me the vaccine had the immediate opportunity to take action and mitigate the damage that had been done, once discovered. Which they took.”

“Let the record reflect the witness is referring to Staff Sergeant Carlos Antonio Oliveira, currently of the Federal Bioterror Commission.” The Congresswoman noted. 

“Antonio?” Kevin whispered, with a snicker, and Carlos rolled his eyes.

“Go fuck yourself,” Carlos whispered back, and tried to focus on the proceedings.

“Correct.” Jill said. “His story is my story as well. The members of STARS had no idea we were being directed by those employed by Umbrella, and Umbrella was not forthcoming with information even regarding their own employees. All we can do now is fix it, which he tried to do by administering the vaccine. That’s why I’m here today. You’ll find Umbrella itself had precious little to do with me receiving the vaccine, but they do have everything to do with why I needed it in the first place.”

“But the person in question, as you say, was still an employee of Umbrella when it was administered.”

“That’s correct. Technically.”

“So an employee of Umbrella did choose to give you the only dose of the vaccine.”

“That’s not correct. There was another sample of the vaccine, but it was destroyed.”

“Destroyed, by whom?”

“Nicholai Ginovaef, another member of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service.”

“Hold on,” the Congresswoman said, with a chuckle, “you’re telling us not only were there two doses, but one was given to you, and the other was destroyed. For what reason?”

Jill opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted by Graham. “Objection.” He said. “Again — the witness can’t speak to the reasoning of another person.”

“I’m not asking the witness to read minds,” the Congresswoman said, “I’m simply asking if a motivation to destroy the vaccine was made clear in Miss Valentine’s presence, given her testimony that one was administered, they would have no reason to destroy the other.”

The Justice considered this. “Overruled. Miss Valentine, you may answer.”

“Mister Ginovaef stated that he was an employee of another company at the same time he was employed by Umbrella, and was ordered to destroy Umbrella. He gave no further explanation than that. He then shot the canister, rendering the vaccine unusable.”

The Congresswoman nodded. “Very dramatic. Do you have any proof of this?”

“The prosecution would like to bring the court’s attention to Exhibit 35.” Congressman Graham said. “The intelligence report the Congresswoman also refers to was written by Mr. Ginovaef before his death, retrieved from the backups of his personal device.” The Justice gestured for the papers to be passed to him, and Congressman Graham did so. “It details Miss Valentine being intentionally infected, as well as the harvesting of combat data by Mister Ginovaef to sell to another entity.”

The Justice read for a long time, one hand on his forehead. The thick white shock of his hair caught the light. “It does appear that way,” he finally said.

“Permission to redirect?” The Congresswoman asked.

“Permission granted,” the Justice replied, still reading.

“This sounds very circumstantial,” the Congresswoman said, with a laugh that tried to sound aloof but only sounded nervous, “even if Mister Ginovaef did harvest combat data to sell, that doesn’t mean he destroyed the vaccine. We have no idea who destroyed that canister or why. It could have been you, Miss Valentine, for all we know.”

“Apologies, Madam Congresswoman,” Jill leaned close to the microphone. Though her tone was professional and polite, maybe even edging into sweetness, there an undeniable challenge in it, coiled and ready. “What was the question?”

“An observation. I have no further questions.” The Congresswoman said, sounding very tired, and very fed up. “My time has run up. I yield the floor.”

“We’ll take a break for lunch and then reconvene,” the Justice said, “please return at 1:15pm in this room. Dismissed.”

  
***

  
Jill tried to eat her salad but her stomach was too empty and too upset, her hands too shaky, her nerves too shot. She pushed a few leaves of spinach around on her plate.

“You ever considered becoming a lawyer?” Graham joked, in his dusty, soft laugh. “That was… phew. I think they’re still scrubbing her blood out of the carpet.”

“She’s up for re-election next November, you know.” Rebecca said. “Not popular, either. You might’ve just popped her balloon.”

“I’m not trying to showboat,” Jill said, “we were told not to let them jerk us around. Too much?”

Graham shook his head. “Just enough. They’ll be looking for ways to run out your time, now, though, since you’ve shown them you won’t let them take it.”

Jill poked at her salad. “They can try,” she said, and left it at that.

  
***

  
“Good afternoon, Miss Valentine.” Said Mister Shores, a man with a pointed, moon-shaped face and squinted eyes, thinning hair precariously combed so it just barely covered a bald spot. “And let me be the first to tell you, thank you for your service, both to our country and to your community.”

“Good afternoon,” Jill told him. “Thank you, Congressman.”

“Would you describe yourself as healthy, Miss Valentine?”

Jill blinked. “Yes,” she said, “I would.”

“Because the records our office has obtained from the Indiana board of Veteran’s affairs details a pretty long rap sheet for you,” he said, “specifically mental illness.”

Jill said nothing.

“Objection,” Graham said, shaking his head, “the witness’ medical information is protected under HIPAA.”

“Not unless their inclusion is for the greater public good,” Mister Shores replied, “and given the effects of dissolving a company like Umbrella would have on the world economy, the public good is very much being discussed here.”

“I’ll allow it — for now,” the Justice said, his eyes narrowed, “but watch it, Mister Shores. You’re on thin ice.”

“So,” Mister Shores continued, “would you agree that your mental health has been… maybe not the most robust, since July sixth of 1998, after the Arklay Mansion incident?”

“I would say that’s a fair assessment,” Jill said, “I’ve received incredible care, but the incident was... very traumatic.”

“Very well said,” Mister Shores replied, “do you hear voices?”

“Well, that depends,” Jill said, with a smile on her face, “I hear yours right now.”

A rumble of laughter.

Mister Shores laughed, as well. “But you know what I mean. Do you hear… voices, of people who aren’t there?”

“No.”

“But you do take medicine for post traumatic stress disorder, night terrors, and acute anxiety disorder. Do you not?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So… simply from this bevy of narcotics they’ve got you doped up on,” Mr. Shores said, “have you ever experienced side effects?”

Jill shook her head. “They haven’t doped me up on anything. So no, I haven’t.”

“So you don’t experience side effects? No… dry mouth, no fatigue…”

“I don’t experience side effects from being ‘doped up’, since I am not, so my answer to your question is ‘no’.”

Mister Shores looked to the Justice. “Avoiding the question, Your Honor.”

“I’m inclined to agree with Miss Valentine, actually,” the Justice said, “you’re leading. Rephrase or drop the question.”

Mister Shores nodded. “So. Do you experience side effects from your medication?”

“Yes. Sometimes it makes it hard to eat.”

“And that’s all?”

“Aside from some mild sleepiness, yes, but I take them at night, so I haven’t had that side effect in a while.”

“Hm. According to your visit here to the Federal Bioterror Commission’s D.C satellite office on May fifth,” he said, “the notes on your last visit to your doctor say that you’d returned with concerns that the T-virus was still in your body despite the presence of antibodies. Do you think that’s a thought process that would occur to a healthy mind, positively effected by the medications she’s been prescribed? That sounds a bit paranoid, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”

“I took an oath to protect the people. And if for any reason I was given to suspect I was a carrier of a virus that—”

“Miss Valentine. My question was very straightforward. There’s no need for theatrics.”

“And my answer is very straightforward, if the Congressman will allow me to finish.”

“Of course you’re allowed to finish, if you’re actually answering the questions posed of you.”

“You’re going to have a very difficult time determining whether or not I’ve answered if you don’t let me complete them.”

Congressman Graham nudged Jill with his foot under the table. As if in concert, the Justice banged his gavel and then spoke.

“Stop provoking the witness, Mr. Shores. And Miss Valentine, you do have a minute to respond, but please remember where you are. Her time will restart.”

“I took an oath to protect the people.” Jill said. “Out of an abundance of caution, I had myself examined by a medical professional when I began to exhibit what I understood as symptoms of a deadly and highly contagious disease. I was _responsible_. Not paranoid.”

“I suppose that’s up to interpretation.” Mister Shores said. He leaned forward, his voice increasing in volume. “What I see before me is a woman who thought being in the Army ensured she was suited to SWAT work. But you couldn’t make it as a police officer, and after being exposed to one single traumatic incident, you cracked under the pressure. And instead of turning that blame inward—”

“Objection!” Congressman Graham exclaimed. 

The Judge shook his head. “Mister Shores…”

“—you and your friends decided to concoct some insane conspiracy theory blaming the nearest company who could offer you a payday. Why would you work with Umbrella if they were so evil? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Mister Shores, if you do not stop taunting the witness, I will hold you in—”

“I’d like to answer him, actually,” Jill said, softly. Congressman Graham leaned in.

“You don’t have to,” he murmured, away from the microphone. 

“I know.” Jill said.

Silence in the chamber, so still and thick it seemed to vibrate, its own entity. Jill took a breath in, steadied herself, and then said: “Tyrell Patrick. Do you know that name? Without looking at your paper.”

Mister Shores squinted, and shook his head. “I’m sorry?”

“I am too. But do you know who Tyrell Patrick is?”

“Your honor—”

“What about Murphy Seeker? Do you know who Murphy Seeker is? How about Isaac Graves?”

The Justice banged his gavel again. “Miss Valentine—”

“I have a minute.” Jill said, and turned to the Justice, her voice quiet, serious. “I would like my time to respond.” 

“You have your minute, but you will respect the decorum of this chamber.”

Jill turned back to the Congressman. “Isaac Graves. Murphy Seeker. Tyrell Patrick. Mikhail Viktor. Those are all Umbrella employees, Mister Shores, all employees who were lied to by their command and died for it. All of them tried to do the right thing when presented with what Umbrella was really doing in Raccoon City. They died as heroes, no matter who cut their paychecks. I didn’t ‘work with Umbrella’, I worked with people Umbrella had deceived, just like they deceived my squadmates and I. It has always been the people versus Umbrella, every single time.”

“And we’re to believe someone with a clear history of mental illness has the ability to decide who is actually good and actually evil in this situation?”

“I didn’t have to _decide. Anything._ ” Jill spat back, her voice loud and shaking, no longer controlled. “Umbrella decided for anybody who was paying attention, even if that attention came too late. Surgeons like Doctor Hamilton who had to live through months of people dying agonizing deaths under his care. Good officers like Rebecca Chambers and Leon Kennedy, who had to live through an absolute _nightmare_ because they had the gall to want to help people. Doctor Behara, who dedicated his life to rooting out this barbaric cruelty and died for it before he could tell the world what he saw. And how many people behind me now have empty spots at their dinner tables? How many did _everything_ that was asked of them and because some rich sadists weren’t content with being rich and powerful, and wanted to play God instead, now they’re without their children? Their parents? How many aren’t even here to tell us what they’ve lost, because it was everything? We didn’t decide. We survived, and that’s the hell of it. Now we have to live with it _every single day._ You can judge this case one way or another, but for me?”

Jill gestured back over her shoulder to the chambers. “For _them? This is what life is now._ Knowing what is actual evil looks like, staring it in the face, and knowing the people who made it happen might _never_ see justice, and having to live with that _every. Single. Day.”_ She paused. Tapped her fingers on the table top, her face a pronounced frown, then shook her head. “That’s my minute. I have nothing else to say.”

Mister Shores opened his mouth to respond, sighed, and closed it. “I have nothing further. I yield the floor.” He tossed his pen down onto his desk.

In the crowd, Kevin laced his fingers behind his head and let out a long, low whistle. “Not sure what fresh hell I was expecting, but I know I wasn’t expecting _that_.”

Beside him, Carlos was silent. Kevin turned to him, and extended an elbow to nudge his side for a response. He stopped when he saw the man beside him swipe the wetness from his face with one of his large hands.

“Shit, Heavy, you okay?”

Carlos nodded, swallowed. When he spoke his voice was thick and wet. “I’m good, man. Just give me a minute.”

  
***

Somewhere Else  
Later That Afternoon

The room was dark, damp, and quiet. It was when he heard a scream and could not determine whether it was coming from somewhere outside or from his own brain that it occurred to Benjamin he was finally in over his head. 

His eyes flickered to the telephone. Gray plastic and silent for hours at a time. The phone’s long tangled cord draped over the side of the singular piece of furniture in the room, the office desk at which he sat. The desk that was somewhere between laminated wood and metal, both and neither at once. A cheap piece of crap no doubt harvested from some abandoned office building or another, not like the polished redwood and oak furnishings he was used to. The chair they’d given him was stained with white and gray auras of some sort of fluid he tried not to think about. 

The man to the side of the desk was silent and unresponsive as the telephone, gloved hands on the stock of his assault rifle. He stared straight ahead, never looking at Benjamin, never talking, only the muted hiss of breath under his black mask and the gentle jingle of rings and clasps when he moved back and forth on his feet. Was his mask also made of plastic? Would the wide red button eyes blink to life like a Call Waiting indicator when the phone rang? Beep beep, call waiting on line one?

Benjamin sighed, a grumbling noise full of frustration. He was not a man who was used to being kept waiting. Until now he had coasted through life with the self-satisfaction of those who excel by depending on random acts of chance. He’d been born to a decently wealthy family. His high school and college education had both been bought and paid for, and as the son of a career military man, his name carried a certain clout with the brass that made climbing the ladder less of a climb and more of an assisted lift. Of course, nobody was perfect. Politics was a business notorious for both its slime and its centripetal force: once you got in, the perks made it very, very hard to get out, and at Benjamin’s echelon, though his ego recoiled against the thought with a stubbornness that was almost religious, he was more politician than Marine. Why even bother climbing the ranks if you wouldn’t let yourself enjoy the perks of the position? Wasn’t taking advantage expected, a sort of baked-in supposition of his title he’d given up so much for? 

Of course it was. 

But he had gotten greedy. A sly handshake and a favor here and there under the cover of night had become a thousand dollar check, which became five, which became twenty. Eventually his family learned to expect the money. Either they didn’t realize he didn’t make that much above board or didn’t care, and spent with happy ignorance on things that were not easily returned; the best private schools became the best private colleges, became saving for his grandchildren to attend the best private schools, which became donating to secure further political influence. His wife had no problem spending the money on things they “needed”, and the sudden absence of it would have been suspicious. Fifty thousand was a lot to owe but not a lot to have, and though his salary was generous, it was nowhere near as generous as Umbrella had been.

None of this was worth it. Of course it wasn’t—they made it sound so easy, so enticing, until there was no way out and they had your balls in their fist. There was a far cry from the money and the hobnobbing and the favors to this, your family sealed away in some undisclosed location, sitting in a cement room under constant guard with nothing to do but wait. Everything was easy, everything glittered... until you couldn't pay, that was.

The phone rang and Benjamin lunged for it, knocked it off its cradle. The receiver hit the cement floor with a cracking noise and he was sure he’d broken it. Benjamin cursed, lifted the receiver, and placed it against his ear.

“Hello?”

A voice, smooth like accented silk, possessed of utter calm and total control. Somewhere between British and German. Maybe both. “Benjamin.” It caressed his ear like an unwanted sexual advance, and he twisted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Its been six hours. You told me you’d call six hours ago.”

“Yes. I did.”

An illustrative silence. The man continued.

“I would ask if our agreed-upon arrangement was completed to my satisfaction… but to determine that answer, all one has to do is turn on the television.” A pause. “Do you care to elaborate?”

Benjamin gave the man across from him a hard once-over. Convinced he wasn’t moving, Benjamin turned his attention away. “The intel was bad. She wasn’t there. He must have taken her somewhere else.”

“You speak in generalities when I require specifics and precision. 'She' and 'he' means nothing to me.”

“Cut the shit. You know who I’m talking about. _Where is my family?_ ” 

“Speaking of your family—that is quite a bold tone for a man without leverage to take, Benjamin. I suggest politeness.” 

Benjamin breathed out. “Valentine. Valentine wasn’t there at the address we were provided. Oliveira… Oliveira must have taken her somewhere else.”

“Oliveira. Captain of your team.” 

_You fucking commie son of a whore, who else would I be talking about?_ “Yes. Staff Sergeant Oliveira. He must have… have a safehouse, or—”

“You assured me you’d have disposed of both of them by two weeks ago. As well as Kennedy and… Ryman.” A subtle sound of distaste. “But yet…”

“I know. I just need more time.”

There were no vocal tics, no conversational sounds of understanding or doubt. Only words and then complete silence. It was as if he were talking to a robot, with only pauses for information dissemination, the answers pre-programmed and spit out from a database. “Need I remind you the investments we have made in you, Benjamin?”

“No. No, I know.”

“I’ve provided you with two doses of a proprietary intellectual property. Did you administer them?”

“Behara did. I know he did. He gave them to Oliveira and Kennedy. We have proof. Bloodwork, from both of them. We gave them just enough and released them back into the group. Just like we agreed.”

Silence, icy and absolute. “Oliveira is in contact with Valentine.”

“Yes. I know that for a fact.”

“And Kennedy is in contact with Claire Redfield.”

“That’s what the contacts have told me.”

“Then… if you have done what you say you’ve done… explain to me how Chris Redfield is still alive.”

There it was. The Golden Ticket, the bullseye, the Endgame. The one that had somehow evaded this entire operation no matter what sort of solution they threw at the wall; he wouldn’t join, wouldn’t present himself for medical treatment, he wouldn’t testify, wouldn’t stop beating on Benjamin’s men and forcing him to conscript new ones, expensive as that was. Wesker had a hard-on for the entire gaggle of fucked-up cops and their peripheral hangers-on, but somehow the conversation always came back to the same Chair Force burnout. Benjamin’s brain rifled through explanations, delay tactics, appeasement, and then smacked flush against an idea so outlandish it only occurred to him as the product of pure desperation.

“Graham,” Benjamin blurted, “I know where he lives. If he’s—if he’s not there, the trial—they’ll have to appoint a new prosecutor. It’ll buy us a few days. Please, just… I just need more time. Just a few more days. I made good on what we talked about. I cleaned up your messes in Scotland, and in the Ukraine. Nobody found out about them. That has to be worth something. Please.”

“I am not confident in your ability to produce results, nor am I moved by your begging. But as loathe as I am to agree with you, this may be our only option left. I will personally see to Congressman Graham. You have one more chance to fulfill your contractual obligations, or the next time you see my compatriot…” 

The man in the mask turned to him. Walked towards Benjamin and stopped so close that their bodies touched, the heavy mesh weave of his uniform thick and stiff.

“He will have a package for you. Do I need to tell you what will be in that package, Benjamin?”

The muted hiss of breath. 

“N-no.”

“Good.”

The phone line disconnected with a click, and the needle-sharp trill of the dial tone sung its shrill song into the dank air. The man in the mask turned and departed through the door with a clatter of equipment and the authoritative clomp of boot soles against cement, cold and hard. 

Benjamin could hear the screams again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 12/31/20 — Hey guys! I hope you’re all doing okay and having happy holidays. I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe and healthy.
> 
> I appreciate you reading my story and coming on this adventure with me. I’ve been thinking about C&R for a while and I unfortunately think this story will end up going unfinished. The unfortunate truth is it seems interaction/interest for RE stuff, and this ship is way, way down, and therefore it’s not getting the sort of response from readers it once did. While I love writing, and writing for you guys, if the audience isn’t there my interest in writing it also kind of disappears, which has been part of why chapters are so slow. I’ve had so much fun doing this and accomplished more than I thought I could in a single story, and that was thanks to the support I got from the AO3 community. I appreciate all of you, and thank you so so much for reading my writing!
> 
> I’ll leave it up and maybe will work on other stories in the meantime. Again, I hope you’re all doing okay, and thank you so much for your support, kind words, your kudos, all of it. 🖤 I love you guys!!  
> \- lucky


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